The UK's New Under-16 Social Media Ban Will Cause More Harm Than It Prevents

48 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by Brajeshwar
(eff.org)

65 Comments

cbdumas

2 hours ago

If governments want to set up online age gates, they should be responsible for providing an electronic ID system and enable privacy preserving age verification (zero knowledge proofs)

Aurornis

2 hours ago

Zero knowledge proofs don't accomplish the ID checking that the governments want.

The reason all of these improvised ID check systems require you to do things like submit a video of you moving your face around (which has its own problems) is because they want to get closer to proving that the ID you submit is actually the ID of the person holding the phone, not just some ID (or zero knowledge proof) you copied from the internet.

2OEH8eoCRo0

2 hours ago

Implementation detail. Fine companies that allow minors access and they'll find a way to verify age by themselves.

For liquor for example I don't think the govt actually specifies that you shall check ID they specify that you shall not sell to minors.

foltik

an hour ago

> they'll find a way to verify age by themselves.

Yeah, by outsourcing it to some shady company that sells all your private info to the lowest bidder. See Discord for example.

2OEH8eoCRo0

an hour ago

Don't use the site then? Or sites can compete on which age verifies in the least shitty way?

I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.

foltik

an hour ago

Classic. So tell me how I can just not deal with the credit bureaus? Or tax filing companies? Or any site that sells my data to adtech, without totally secluding myself from the modern web? Where’s the competition?

What you’re saying is functionally equivalent to “just deal with it,” since ultimately people will choose to have their privacy violated over the lifelong Sisyphean task of trying to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean people don’t care about privacy, it’s just the current equilibrium in our broken system.

> I think we have been stuck in this way of life so long we can't imagine an alternative.

I agree.

btbuildem

2 hours ago

Canadian federal govt just pushed thru a slew of similar legislation - absolutely unprecedented assault on privacy, tools for tracking everyone all the time, minimally constrained, giving broad leeway to a three-person unelected body to implement the actual details.

manwithopinions

2 hours ago

The EFF believes the ends (freedom) justify the means (access to everything good and bad for everyone). Governments are pragmatic, not fundamentalist.

This article addresses the technological flaws in age verification, then says “but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture.”

If the EFF care about freedom above all else (a reasonable position) muddying the waters with half-baked age verification isn’t perfect arguments is just sloppy.

Why does the freedom matter above all else? That’s what voters need to be convinced of.

big85

2 hours ago

About 2 million adults in the UK don't have government-issued photo ID. Certainly many 16-17 year olds will have trouble verifying their age. They're blocking huge sectors of the UK population from being able to use the internet normally.

rimeice

2 hours ago

Use *social media normally. Social media != The Internet. They’ll be able to use 99.9999% of the internet just fine.

ilovecake1984

2 hours ago

Nobody needs to use social media though.

Really they should just torch the lot.

AJRF

2 hours ago

Am I right in thinking that the EFF doesn't launch any legal campaigns inside the UK (but they offer support to those who do)

Is there a UK version of the EFF that fights in the courts against this lunacy or does it not quite work the same in the UK as it does in the US.

daveoc64

2 hours ago

> Is there a UK version of the EFF that fights in the courts against this lunacy or does it not quite work the same in the UK as it does in the US.

The government looks likely to introduce the ban as regulation through secondary legislation (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9824zvpz9po).

That is open to judicial review.

If primary legislation was instead passed, that's a lot harder to challenge - Parliament makes the law, so whatever Parliament said applies.

Politics is very different in the UK than in the US, especially when the governing party has such a large majority.

The banning of under-16s from social media has widespread support across the parties in Parliament.

pkaye

an hour ago

If its primary legislation (Acts of Parliament) like Online Safety Act, the courts cannot strike it down. If its secondary legislation by ministers and other agencies, it could be contested in courts.

ilovecake1984

2 hours ago

It’s overwhelmingly supported action.

The technical incoherence doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to say “you can’t use Snapchat” and then they say “my friend xxx uses it” you can say “xxx’s parent are delinquent”

This isn’t about blocking as much as setting societal expectations.

rimeice

2 hours ago

Totally agree. Setting the tone is so important. It’s so bad it’s “illegal” is a lot more convincing than saying to your kid, “well the research shows…”

proxyscore

2 hours ago

There's no defending social media, not for adults, not for kids, ever.

It's a toxic trap which will do absolutely nothing good for and to its users.

Keep the kids away from it, doesn't take an Einstein reincarnate to realize that.

rahimnathwani

an hour ago

Hacker News is a social media site, but not according to the UK government.

According to the UK government, YouTube is a social media site.

dylan604

2 hours ago

This is the slipperiest of slopes. I'm all for restricting social consumption, but absolutely against the current suggestions for age restrictions methods. The end goal is noble, the means of achieving it are sinister

ungreased0675

2 hours ago

The EFF is very wrong on this one. Some things are bad and we should keep children away from them.

infotainment

2 hours ago

The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.

This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.

big85

2 hours ago

We have parental controls on devices. The change forced by the UK government is to give control to corporations, instead of the parents.

Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.

dreambuffer

an hour ago

This is a tricky one, but it actually gives control to the government, not corporations. The government now has rules which let them define what social media is and how big its market can be.

The government is, frankly, just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. That's a controversial statement, but truthfully most parents are just not educated enough or strict enough to decide where the boundaries should be on their children's health.

Barrin92

2 hours ago

>We have parental controls on devices

That's irrelevant because social media regulation is a collective action problem. No individual parent can restrict their kids access to social media without ostracizing it, it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms.

user

an hour ago

[deleted]

joe_mamba

2 hours ago

>it only makes sense if all parents together get their kids off these platforms

Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government which has its own agenda at play in which to weaponize this public outrage for their own benefit(mass surveillance and mass censorship).

The UK government doesn't actually want what's best for all the children of all the parents, otherwise it wouldn't have allowed and even enabled the rape gangs and sweep the issue under the rug in a massive coverup.

Barrin92

an hour ago

>Yes, and the wishes of all parents together != the wishes of the UK government

This legislation has widespread support among British parents across the political spectrum[1]

"As YouGov has shown previously, such a policy would be widely popular with the general public. In our latest survey, looking more specifically at the views of parents, we find that 77% of those with children under the age of 18 would support a ban, compared to only 14% who are opposed.[...] Likewise, 76% of parents think the government needs to kick up their activity on this issue, although a much lower rate of 43% think they need to be doing “much more”."

I don't even have any idea what the last paragraph, other than being some generic twitter rant has to do with the topic of the thread

[1]https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...

CuriouslyC

2 hours ago

I'm all for protecting kids from facebook/insta/snap/etc, they have love hate relationships with all of those, but YT is a bridge too far, is's more a knowledge sharing platform than a social network.

infotainment

2 hours ago

If you primarily choose to watch educational videos sure, but YouTube can give you just as much brainrot as TikTok, depending on what the recommendation engine decides you might like.

bob001

2 hours ago

Then it can separate the two separate components easily to satisfy whatever the law is. If it can’t then it is social media. A lot of YouTube is not knowledge sharing unless you view MrBeast as a sharer of knowledge.

ndngmfksk

2 hours ago

I think the personalised content and advertising puts it into the same category. At least, I think it has the same problematic incentives.

cebert

2 hours ago

Parents are there to protect their children. The potential harm caused by eroded privacy and reduced control over our devices is not worth the perceived benefits of this policy in ensuring children’s safety.

dreambuffer

an hour ago

Unpopular to say, but the government is just better at deciding what's good for most children than their parents when it comes to matters of health. Unfortunately most parents are just very uneducated or lacking in discipline, and no child should be punished in the name of freedom. That being said, age verification laws are obviously a bad way to do that. They should just ban specific categories of social media outright.

odiroot

2 hours ago

Some things, like invasion of privacy, are bad enough, that we should protect all citizens from it, independent of age.

applfanboysbgon

2 hours ago

Great, you do your job as a parent and keep your children away from them while leaving the rest of us free from your envisioned surveillance state.

4ndrewl

2 hours ago

He says clicking "accept" to tracking cookies and their 762 "partners"

3997531578

2 hours ago

Not surpised supporters of the regime don't know about tracking protection.

It's always the tech illiterates cheering on the surveillance.

4ndrewl

an hour ago

Weird take. And brutally, if predictably, wrong (client ad-blockers, pihole, wireguard if you must know).

enoeht

2 hours ago

Couple of Months latter kids will have vipe coded their decentralized sm version that's here to stay.

When will politicians understand how and why the internet was build?

throwawayffffas

2 hours ago

They are really underestimating the harm of being on these platforms causes.

These platforms are the digital equivalent of heroin if heroin always came with either nazi or bolshevik propaganda.

They are entirely focused on the axe they rightfully have to grind the whole age verification debacle they are not seeing the bigger picture.

The major social media companies are undermining the foundations of our societies for ad revenue and giggles.

Keeping teens out is a huge step in the right direction.

throwawayffffas

2 hours ago

I find the idea that someone would care about their privacy and choose to be on social media really hard to fathom. These things are personal data vacuums that infer everything there is to know about you, if you don't just give it to them.

queenkjuul

an hour ago

Lmao yeah, bolshevik propaganda. Hilarious.

nativeit

2 hours ago

I do believe social media should be verboten for younger people, although I believe it should be enforced by good parenting rather than legislation. That said, we live in a society, and sometimes that means our libertarian ideals don’t work on the large scale. I reserve judgement for the people of the UK, their government isn’t without its serious faults, but less regulation doesn’t seem to be the panacea Reagan and Thatcher sold it to be.

rimeice

2 hours ago

> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.

Cmon, if you’re trying to make the case for how essential social media is for children under the age of 16, please find some better examples. As if there are no other sources of educational content online than YouTube and anyone who has left Facebook knows the last two points are simply not true. This is so weak from the EFF.

2OEH8eoCRo0

2 hours ago

Big tech is deathly afraid of these experiments having a good outcome.

bebe83939

2 hours ago

I am all for it. UK has a big problem with organized pedofile crime, and this may prevent it.

bob001

2 hours ago

> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.

How in the world did kids ever survive before social media? Miracle of god keeping them sane every second of their miserable deprived lives. Seriously, this is such a bad argument for something that is a return to a previous known good state versus being a new state. No proof provided that social media makes any of these better versus either pre social media approaches or modern alternatives.

iLoveOncall

2 hours ago

So because humans used to survive in caves eating raw meet we should go back to that?

bob001

2 hours ago

Ah a strawmen augment. This is comparing two specific states. If you’re admitting that the two states of pre and post social media are the same by virtue of resorting to a strawmen then glad we agree.

markus_zhang

2 hours ago

Just ban all social media, no need for consent, no need for age detection BS.

herghost

2 hours ago

This is a horrible straw-man of the situation which somewhat conveniently manages to sidestep any real acknowledgement of the genuine harm and its scale.

Terrible article.

somewhereoutth

2 hours ago

*to billionaires

but snark aside, society needs to have a big conversation (meaning political) about what is good and what is bad about what should really be understood as the 'connectivity revolution' of the last 10-20 years.

AussieWog93

2 hours ago

Honestly I would love to see a ban on social media in general, for all ages (or more specifically, content that's algorithmically feed and reliant on ads/engagement). Take out Tinder and gambling while you're at it.

EFF are way off base here - this isn't "free as in free speech" but "free as in giant corporations are free to fuck people up the arse".

d4nt

2 hours ago

I agree, chronological feeds of people you’ve explicitly chosen to follow are fine, but AIs looking to optimize engagement have caused untold damage to society. Future generations will study it as an example of unintended consequences in AI systems. The sooner we shutdown this disastrous technology the better.

CuriouslyC

2 hours ago

The whole idea of this is broken, since so much of our collective knowledge is locked away in YouTube/Reddit. It's making a law against children in libraries because there are adult books in it.

ilovecake1984

2 hours ago

There is some okay stuff on YouTube.

There is nothing stopping people reposting stuff on platforms without social media elements and with proper curation and publisher responsibilities.

Most big YouTubers would love this to happen I’m sure.

krapp

an hour ago

This will be a controversial statement here, but for better or worse, Youtube is a modern Library of Alexandria. It archives a significant amount of human knowledge and culture in video form, and for a lot of it, there is no backup.

Big, popular channels do push their viewers to alternative platforms like Patreon because of Youtube's censorship guidelines and arbitrary demonetization, but a lot of valuable content is on smaller channels where the owners may not have the wherewithal to transfer all of their content, much less their audience.