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.
This is based, adults next.
Any government that oversteps so much that it thinks its role is as the parent, must be abolished.
Let them eat guns and cigarettes.
Really interesting they push for that the day of the report of investigation regarding rape gang and how the gouvernement didn’t protect children en even enable harm toward them. Trully disgusting. Really hope they get prosecuted by the next gouvernement
Why stop at 16
Get rid of all of it
We never needed it anyway
I agree, but on the ageism point. The thing that needs to be done is regulation so that manipulative design is reduced. Its the corporations that are the problem. Bans only target the victims the most.
Consequences for rich people? Not blaming their victims?!? Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway??
I fully support the battle against attention-consuming energy vampires but I’m afraid this is probably not going to work practically.
How do you get an entire population of adults to voluntarily scan their faces and submit them to Palantir?
By banning them from the Internet
Aren’t they already scanned? Don’t know about the UK but in modern countries there are cameras everywhere
It’s insane that they’ll say it’s designed to be addictive, and then just let the company keep doing that. Like maybe go after the entity producing the addictive substance directly then?
All social media is designed to be addictive, though. It’s their entire business model.
and a large part of that is the up/down vote systems, and other gamifications of human interaction.
And they’ve spread out of social media into many other website types.
All it does is extremify human interaction and is a major component in why we’re at the point we are right now with right wing extremism and fascism on the rise.
Get rid of these systems, and let people just communicate with eachother without having to appeal to a hive mind to tell people who gave up thinking if somethings good or bad based on votes/reactions/etc
Lemmy and the whole Fediverse is social media. What do you think social media is?
Lemmy is addicting naturally, not being fed slop via an algorithm.
That’s the problem with this panic. Everybody is using a different definition of social media. You and the other guy don’t hate social media, you hate Meta, X, and TikTok. And the government hates that too but also defines the Fediverse and forums in general, plus video games and anywhere else you might talk to another human being as social media as well.
So if you’re on a social media site like Lemmy or Piefed and you’re complaining about how evil and addictive social media is, the government is going to read that and think “My god! This poor person is in trouble! They’re screaming for my help! I must pass a law to ban Lemmy and liberate Derpgon from they’re horrible addiction to the Fediverse! That’s what Derpgon wants!”
Its a webforum, not a social media.
Social media is places that revolve around shit in your real life no one cares about. Facebook, Instagram,Tiktok,Etc.
Reddit and the Fediverse are listed in the Wikipedia article about social media as social media:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Social media is media where people can socialize.
First of all, Don’t blatantly lie about the very thing you are linking to. It is not listed as social media.
They simply say some people (mostly idiots) refer to it as social media.
So thats already points on you for intentionally and willfully misrepresenting information.
Also the entire article is bunk cause it calls Mozilla and Minecraft social media. Which is stupid. Because Mozilla is a fucking company that makes a browser, and Minecraft is a goddamn game.
Second of all, You can wrongly refer to something as social media all you want.
I can write Fuck You on a brick and throw it through your window, and just because I
Call it Macaronirefer to it as social media, doesnt magically make it social media.
The engagement-based algorithmic feed is the problem. Kids being able to talk to strangers is also an issue, but that isn’t because of addiction, and I personally think public chats should just be opt-in with the expectation that the parents will actually do their job and teach their children not to talk to strangers.
I think it’s insane because social media is addictive because being social and communicating with fellow human beings is addictive. That’s what you and me are doing here and why we find it so pleasurable. That is not a bad thing.
It’s a bizarre lesson to drill into our children’s brains that this is a negative thing. I assume they don’t really know what social media is and see it as distinct, more like the one way communication of comic books, rock n roll, and other media moral panics, and they assume children will too. But what will happen to the next generation is that they will see all forms of human interaction as horribly addictive, amoral, and unhealthy.
The algorithm is the problem
Social media needs to go away, fully. Not just for kids.
It should be regulated like gambling
That would be lovely.
It should become social again. No faking and manipulation at the penalty of criminal punishment.
It was great when it was a small pod of your close friends sharing stuff together.
But now it’s just an algorithm that shows you what you want to see by people pushing products and flat out lying. It’s done. It needs to go away.
Said a person or AI on a social media…
this is a forum. Which, is totally different. You can’t be serious.
Social media would become a ghost town.
No it wouldnt. It’d be a .001% reduction in users.
If you want social media to become a ghost town, ban bots/AI
Can they even do it? AI nowadays can reliably parse captchas, present themselves as adults, with little effort they’ll even present documents and “real” photos
Full digital ID. Then the only for AI to get in is to steal a real human’s identification.
Many civilized countries already have some system like this in place for critical stuff like banking, online healthcare, etc.
They could but it’s symbiotic. Social Media churns engagement using bots, which generates ad revenue.
Not to mention that large Social Media companies like Meta are almost certainly filtering out bot content to train LLMs on.
They obviously don’t want to do it. But my point is that I think they actually can’t.
I mean Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare definitely can’t filter real people from AI. Documents photos, real time videos, those are even easier for AI to fake than to the real people to make them.
That brings us to the good old sms to a physical sim card purchased in a real shop with human face and document check. And that also will be spoofed in like 6 months.
I mean if people can figure out bot accounts and make lists of them just by looking at them, I’m pretty sure the companies that see 25000 accounts all connect from the same IP address can figure it out.
if people can figure out bot accounts
That’s a big IF and most of the times they don’t.
25000 accounts all connect from the same IP address
That’s just not how it works.
RIP Minecraft live lol
Apparently they count Youtube as social media
No more SML for British kids.
Anything to avoid parents actually … parenting their children. Just like making weed illegal stopped everyone from smoking it! :D Same with alcohol.
Making weed illegal created a causa belli for an uncountable number of police stops and searches.
Oh yeah they wanted to mess with minorities and hippies
And guns! Making them illegal did nothing for people using guns to murder each other!
… oh wait.
It should have the Zuck riding the horse. He’s the one pushing for this so the advertisers know if they are showing ads to people and not bots on his platforms.
He definitely isn’t. He already knows. This is 100% governments wanting to crack down on free speech. Look how many people the UK government already jails for social media posts.
Nah it is Netanyahu who is riding Keir directly and whipping him at the same time. What a pathetic excuse of a human. Next extension of this will be to jail anyone who says free Palestine in the internet. Such a convincing way to prove there is no genocide lol.
I have a digital ID and use it all the time. What’s wrong with it?
Why don’t you use your real name on Lemmy?
What for?
As your username. Why don’t you use it?
Because it would be boring?
Not because you want to be anonymous? What’s your name? Address? Phone number?
That’s what the government want to be able to tell. They want to be able to arrest you because you said something they didn’t like, no matter where you say it on the internet.
No, that’s not it. If I wanted to be anonymous I would not use seflhosted instance tied to my personal domain, would I?
We don’t believe you otherwise.
That’s ok, I don’t care if you believe me or not.
Imagine you have a strong opinion against some known ongoing genocide. Would you feel safe expressing yourself online about it? Or imagine that your country takes enough turns to become a dystopian nightmare, which for slme reason is extremely common nowadays… would you feel safe speaking against your own government?
What does any of this has to do with digital ID? I’m using digit ID to access government services and sign documents, not to express my opinions online.
If you use it to access government services it’s a thing, but using it to block the underaged from accessing social media it’s a very different situation.
If you use credit cards to block underage from accessing social media it’s also a different situation. Do you have a credit card?
Yes, but i dont use it to open up an online forum. The problem isn’t the identification itself but when and why do i need to be identified. I thought this was clear.
This conversation is becoming silly. If you dont value your privacy online, thats your thing. I would drop internet usage to the minimum if i ever need to identify myself to use trivial shit like gaming or accessing social media.
And I don’t use my digital ID to open online forums.
You’ll have to use it to express your opinions online. That’s the problem, and the whole point of it. They government want to know exactly what every person says on the internet.
My country had digital ID for 20 years. You’re saying they introduced it only to force age verification decades later? Because they want to do age verification using the EU proposed method, not using our digital IDs.
Your country clearly doesn’t have the type of digital ID that we’re talking about, does it?
What digital ID are you talking about? I have the type which I can import into my browser and use it to identify myself when accessing web sites.
Why does it have to be originally introduced with oppression in mind? Why not realize it provides a nice framework for it and use it instead? US toyed around with the idea of ID verification for anything that connects to internet. It is probably not going so smoothly. This could as well be a smaller experiment. We are talking about a goverment that jails eighty year olds for saying free palestine, not hard to imagine them wanting to do the same in the internet. It is crazy how far rabid zionist lobies can push goverments into oppressing their citizens.
Many things can be used for online identification and oppression, for example credit cards or cellphones. Why singe out digital ID? Are you going to fight against credit cards and cellphones as well or just digital ID?
More like to deanonymize anyone who uses social media.
I think there’s a rational argument for saying anonymous social media is what Russia, China and other dictatorships use to undermine and affect public opinion, to be fair.
I’m not saying therefore anonymity shouldn’t be allowed. I’m just saying there’s a nuance here…
Homegrown capitalists and the states they control are far more profligate and effective at social media manipulation than either Russia or China. Don’t forget that it was Facebook and Cambridge Analytica that made Brexit happen, not Russia or China. Although I guess you did say dictatorships, so that includes the dictatorship of capital that rules the west.
Myeah, sure, maybe, maybe not. But whatever the source, anonymity does enable well-resourced actors to affect opinion change.
It will only be deanonymised for UK citizens though (and any other country that applies some sort of ID verification). Any Russian LLM bot can still spread lies in the internet claiming to be from the UK so no problem solved there.
Worst yet, today it is deanonymisation “because think of the children”, tomorrow it is putting people who say “Free palestine” in social media to prison.
anonymous social media is what Russia, China and other dictatorships use to undermine and affect public opinion
You talk from the past. Nowadays bots are less anonymous than real people.
Funny how this is being imposed on the population at large, but the same politicians pushing it are exempt. So self-sacrificing that they will put their children and grandchildren in peril to protect ours. They’re heroes.
the same politicians pushing it are exempt
Because they’re all over 16?
Right
