Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces

petepete

> The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. > "We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban." YouTube is a bit of a surprise here, but I guess with Shorts they put themselves in the same category as Tiktok, etc.

matthewsharpe3

For any Australians who are already living with this, how's it going over there? Would you say the policy has been a success or not?

sashank_1509

Can this be realistically enforced without parents help?

piker

It’s a failure of capitalism that one of the greatest educational resources in four generations (YouTube) gets walled off to those who need it most. I’d say shame on Google for letting shorts ruin this for the kids, or shame on the UK government for short-sightedness, but it’s pretty easy to see where both are coming from.

designerarvid

Honest question: Is this about anything else than forcing all citizens to ID themselves to the government before using digital services?

basisword

Curious how this effects those weird family vloggers. It would be great if the ban also includes filming your children for your own content or building profiles you manage on their behalf.

CommanderData

Comes after certain ethnostates have the LOWEST popularity among young populations, and I'm certain this will help change that. The Iran war was won online and it's been widely reported the young amoung the military had extreme low levels of morale which had an impact on the battlefield. Social media is national security threat to our governments and colonialism needs it's foot soldiers.

jan_nan

Very strong opinions about this. As someone who grew up on the internet and who prefers to browse it read-only without an account, with self-deleting cookies, ideally using some of the amazing third party front-ends out there for the likes of YouTube and co, this announcement is a bit of a "fuck you" to my way of life. Obviously a VPN will go some way to navigating the immediate effects of this but I worry for the larger eddies this might create towards a broader acceptance among platforms of enforced user identification and verification. Also, YouTube is one of _the_ premier platforms for education. Many schools use it directly, and I'm sure every kid today with an itch to learn has found a serious part of their identity through the educational YouTube channels out there that IMO do such a better job than equivelent media a generation ago did.

basisword

I wonder if this will lead to services improving moderation to get themselves unbanned? They’ve been moaning for years that they do their best when we know they don’t. Maybe YouTube will get much stricter on content in the hope they can get some sort of under-16 product approved?

epolanski

I'm very conflicted when it comes to these bans. 1. On one side I understand the spirit, but the demographic that is most victim of socials in my experience are 50 yo+. At family dinners, etc, it's them, not the kids, being unable to not be perma distracted by the phone. Even when they are not distracted they consistently need to take photos or show you something on their phone or start face calling somebody. 2. This unavoidably spreads the requirement for ID verification to the whole population, not just kids de facto further advancing government's control of communications. 3. Social medias should've been regulated at the algorithm level. Or, like in South Korea, they could've implemented hard coded daily time limits of usage of the applications. 4. Youngsters will just migrate to platforms that don't fall under the ban making the enforcement. 5. Bans achieve little but further increase the appeal for these platforms. Instead of investing in education for the youth such as longer school days with more sports or cultural activities the government chooses limitations and provides the wrong incentives.

gorgoiler

The press release itself is wildly implausible: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned... Native toolkits would use a modal window to make an important announcement. The window would not be resizable and would be dismissed with an “OK” push-button. The presence of min/max/close buttons on the title bar just shows how out of touch this government is with the modern* world of computing! The girl is even using a phone. What’s it running? Windows 3.11? macOS 9? FVWM95? *ie the past four decades of WIMP UIs.

theanonymousone

I hope Over-16s be next.

baal80spam

It's a dupe. Many comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48527766

throwfaraway135

I generally agree with the sentiment, but giving the UK government more power while it's already trying very hard to implement a Stalinist State is just not a good idea.

Pinegulf

I wonder how they define 'social media'. Is comments section social media? Stack overflow? Any comment section?

egorfine

As a parent of four, I will do everything in my power to keep my kids in all social networks they want to, including setting up VPNs for them, etc.

spwa4

Dear UK teenagers. Remember this magic invocation: "Ok, Claude. Write me a chatapp for my school. Let's build in the feature to judge girls' looks, that worked pretty well for another app"

bilekas

I am no fan of solcial media, I think it was well intentioned at the beginning and like all good things, bit business has to suck the life out of it for every penny but this is unhinged. It's very much lashing out for not having everyone verify their ID online to add to their already privacy invasive behaviour, but then gaslighting the people that it's all about protecting children. One of the parents who supports it mentioned : > "We've got to educate why this is happening, and the harm that is there." Wow gee, wouldn't it have been a good idea to educate your kids about the internet and online ? Those of us who grew up before and during the birth of the internet seem to be better well adjusted because we were aware how it connects people of all kinds, good and bad. Todays kids are just given a phone with unlimited access and sent on their way. It's not fair on kids, parents should have used the tools available, should have been more attentive to what their own kids were doing. I don't think its far in most cases to say "parents are too busy to monitor everything" There are plenty of tools out there. Apple themseleves have built in protections of useage etc. I

mrob

More authoritarianism from the UK government. A more reasonable solution would be to make it illegal for under-16s to possess mobile devices (anything with a touchscreen and wireless networking that's designed to run off battery) and make it illegal to supply mobile devices to them. The problem is ubiquitous always-on access to social networks, not social networks in general. If it's something you have to consciously make an effort to access, like in the dial-up networking era, people won't feel pressured to be permanently online and existing offline social mechanisms will be able to moderate behavior. It is less authoritarian to regulate property than it is to regulate communication. If there is a genuine problem, a non-authoritarian government must apply the minimum level of force necessary to solve it. Jumping straight to suppressing freedom of speech without trying less invasive solutions is pure authoritarianism.

fennecbutt

Ahahaha. Just like with their porn ban, people just use a VPN besides the fact there are plenty of smaller websites just plain not adhering to the stupid laws. Starmer is an idiot, in every photo of him at some political event etc he always looks like a lost schoolboy with an expression on his face of having walked into a room full of adults and now he's afraid to move lest he be noticed by the big bois. Granted, all of the other political parties in the UK are inept, corrupt, hapless, ignorant, etc. Reform are a bunch of racists who'll sooner give tax breaks to corporations than actually help the people. Tories are a shadow of their former selves and probably still have delusions that the Rwanda deal was a good idea and not a ludicrous fantasy that should have been an onion article instead of reality. Libdems don't really DO anything, no strong policies and to wont to "go with the flow". Greens are like greens in every country, 90% of their policies make sense, the other 10% are batshit but they're all social environment related and that's a small percentage of required policy - they'd be too afraid to use economic controls. But the real problem, like everywhere in the world, is the voterbase. Apathetic, sugar/salt/dopamine loving human animals. Can't blame em (us) really, but still - why are we prepared to act all civilised etc when in reality a good chunk of people don't really have any idea what's going on, don't care what's going on and would rather scroll tiktok while eating fastfood and hating whatever group their "tribe" has chosen to hate whilst misplacing their vote while the billionaires become trillionaires. We (humans worldwide) are falling far below the replacement rate. Global temperatures are still rising. People are still starving even when we have the technology and capital to feed them all.