Under-16s will be banned from using social media, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced.
Starmer says social media is making children unhappy, making it easier for bullies to abuse children, and is “designed to be addictive”. A ban would give children more time, security, and more freedom to grow up - as well as more opportunities, he adds.
“That is all any parent wants. They want to know that Britain will be better for their children, that they will get a fair chance,” the PM says in a speech in Downing Street.
Starmer adds that the government is “not prepared to compromise” on the safety and happiness of children - and that includes in the regulation and enforcement of this ban. He says the government has listened to and learned from countries like Australia, where a similar ban has already been introduced.
I get that, and it would be a fair assessment if it wasn’t because the real problem here is that parents are not parenting, plain and simple. This is yet another part of this that the social media and tech companies are using to their advantage. They get people hooked, that we agree on. Then they lobby for all this surveillance and forced identifications that uses… (Drumroll) companies owned by the same tech giants, in partnership with the other giants. Now they have made it illegal to not provide them with your data and identity, while removing many underage individuals from the equation. Win-win for them, as their liability drops, and now they can serve more ads directed at each individual, effectively increasing the price advertisers are willing to pay, increasing their revenue. There is absolutely no way to keep children out of any platform without full identification, its that simple. Then the same governments that are pushing this have access to all this data as well, which makes them basically all-knowing about every single person in the population.
There is no universe in which any of this is a good thing. Look at the whole picture, and it’s not the UL, it’s every country in the world doing this, at different levels, with varying level of success and oppression.
These are only some of the many reasons why I will never agree with something like this.
The answer is convincing people that the major social media services available now are bad for everyone regardless of age. For some reason this type of understanding tends to start with the most vulnerable people affected, until we finally admit its bad for everyone. These laws only punish those who use social media and those who provide it as a service, which should reduce social media use in general to a degree, so I’m for it.
Ideally for me, social media wouldn’t exist in the way it does today. If we did have it at all, it would be extremely localized as a means to connect neighbors to one another. Something that would benefit society in some way.