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

bbc.co.uk

21–30 of 118 posts

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

#21

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

This specifically doesn't ID anybody. It's not using the upcoming digital ID, it's just going to use the existing age authentication - eg, you just need to show your company is doing some sort of "serious" age verification (not just enter your DOB here) rather than actually checking identity.

It's bad, shallow populism, but it's not some nefarious surveillance plan, as much as the yanks are going to paint it that way.

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

#22

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

Its wildly popular to the tune of 70% support amongst the general population?

The HN bubble needs to realize that it's not that people don't care, it's that they really want this and also when it didn't work started complaining they wanted even more.

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

#23

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

Yes, it's about the explicitly stated goal of getting kids to stop being harmed by the products of some of the largest advertising agencies on the planet that have resisted more subtle regulation for decades.

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

#24
post #6

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.

Its more of a failure of OS vendors to provide tools for parents to properly raise their children in the digital age.

OS vendors, which are now more interested in selling ad space, than actually developing operating systems - and thus have a vested interest in separating my childs' eyeballs from my agency and responsibility as a parent.

If there were a way for me, in a default out of box OS install, to observe my kids screens, safely and securely in the context of a family unit - the same way I look under their beds for stray socks, and sort their bookshelf, and so on - then there would be less of an issue for "Daddy Internet" to be raising my kids for me, as either bullies or victims.

But in the Western world there is a very strong inclination to separate children from their parents, and abrogate the parents' rights and responsibilities with regards to raising their children - and this totalitarian-authoritarian action from the UK and Australian governments, which are both wholesale rights-abusing entities - is just more of the same.

OS vendors could solve the problem for social networking - give me better tools to administer my childs' computers, and return my agency as a parent that has for the last few decades been utterly deteriorated by the OS vendors' desire to sell more ads.

I would wager that anyone who thinks its a good idea for 'banning' to be the hammer for this nail, probably also thinks that the family unit also needs to be disbanded, for greater social control outside the family home ...

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

#25
post #6

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.

How is it failure of capitalism?

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

#26

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

Have they said you’ll need to provide ID? My guess would be they do it through other mechanisms like age estimation. I know X is already doing this for posts labelled mature. If they do estimation through account age most people are probably already basically verified on lots of the main social media services.

I don't know, hence the question.

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

#27
post #25
post #6

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.

How is it failure of capitalism?

The product was born of and shaped entirely by capitalism? I say this as very much a capitalist.

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

#28
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.

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

#29

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?

It's been very good for encouraging teens to learn more about networking and using AI tools to fake IDs etc.

It's not yet reached threshold levels that would actually likely see teen usage drop dramatically:

  A separate piece of research found that teens thought at least two-thirds of other teens would need to be off social media for them to give it up, too. [2]

[1] March 2026: It’s official: Australia’s teen social media ban isn’t working, yet. https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/31/australias-teen-social-...

[2] May 2026: Australia is fixing its teen social media ban on the fly. Do the changes go far enough? https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/05/01/teen-social-media-ban-a...

All in all, still in flux, things are being tweaked, too early to tell.

I am in favour of throwing challenges in front of teenagers though .. but I'm a grandparent - it's what I do.

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

#30

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?

My 15 year old daughter and her friends, ranging in age from 14 to 16 have more or less been unaffected.

One of her 14 year old friends was locked out of Snapchat for about 10 minutes, until she had another 15 year old friend pass the age verification on her behalf.

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