Newsman: U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced that his government would ban social media for under-16s on Monday morning.
“I think most parents will welcome this action,” Starmer said. “They will welcome a government that stands by them, that supports them to do the best for their children, and that fights for their happiness and safety against the most powerful companies in the world.”
The ex-Love Island personality Georgia Harrison — who described the plans as “absolutely amazing” — and more than a dozen parents from Smartphone Free Childhood.
Molly Rose Foundation, along with 5Rights, youth-led digital wellbeing charity FlippGen, and other civil society voices who’ve warned blanket bans are a blunt instrument that risk doing more harm than good, were kept away from the fanfare, and only invited to a later technical briefing run by officials from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Smartphone Free Childhood, which describes itself as a movement of families “standing together to delay [access to] smartphones and social media,” has long been agitating for precisely the kind of action outlined Monday.
According to a previous report by POLITICO back in January, the charity used its 100,000 person-strong network of WhatsApp groups to organize a grassroots lobbying blitz that saw MPs flooded with messages from concerned parents urging them to back a ban.
The U.K.’s online safety regime has already been a boon for the industry, thanks to provisions under the Online Safety Act that require services to introduce age checks to prevent children from encountering pornography and other types of “primary priority” content.
Now more age-gates are coming — across social media, but also a wide range of services that allow livestreaming and communication with strangers, plus AI chatbots specifically designed for sexually-explicit interactions.
Two, since Ofcom is now carrying out a rapid study on what effective age assurance looks like for the purpose of verifying whether someone is over 16, there could be tighter regulation coming down the track, which is good for companies worried about cheaper but less accurate or privacy-preserving offerings, and bad for those that have so far largely escaped scrutiny.
Secondary legislation — increasingly the government’s preferred tool — is particularly vulnerable to judicial review, and concerns have already been raised about the human rights impacts of blanket bans.
Digital rights activists fear the rapid expansion of poorly regulated age checks will create a backdoor for more intensive surveillance and increase the risk of mass data breaches — and don’t trust the U.K.’s data protection watchdog to take action.
They aren’t fans of Big Tech, of course, but argue the government has failed to take a rights-respecting approach to regulation.
Watch this space. On Friday evening, a group of content creators and activists from the U.K., U.S., EU, Canada, and India met virtually to discuss the launch of a new global movement called “Stop Killing the Internet” in response to jurisdictions the world over converging around the ban playbook, a person on the call told POLITICO.
“The talk is that a Rubicon has been crossed and a line in the sand has to be drawn,” they said. The website went live shortly after Starmer’s announcement, and the campaign will launch in less then two weeks’ time.
Ofcom already has its hands full regulating the more than 100,000 services in scope of the Online Safety Act, parts of which aren’t even in force yet.
Now there’s even more to do, as its group director for online safety Oliver Griffiths acknowledged would be the case last month. Many of the proposals outlined by the government in its kids’ online safety consultation “create new duties and require comprehensive policy work to implement,” he said.
“The Government has entrusted us to build on this progress with new measures to protect children, and we’re ready to work closely with them as the detailed regulations take shape,” a spokesperson said in a statement Monday.
‘Safety by design’
The government’s decision to kick kids off social media suggests it buys the argument — at least in the short term — that platforms can’t be made age-appropriate through regulation.
“We remain of the view that banning children from social media platforms without addressing the underlying, unsafe and addictive design choices made by tech companies that place profit before safety and well-being will not make them safer,” the Online Safety Act Network’s director Maeve Walsh said.
