Social Media Ban

Teenagers of the world rejoice! The Government’s announcement today of a proposed social media ban will not lead to a big increase in VPN use, widespread surveillance and associated privacy disasters, with mass evasion rendering the whole thing a little bit pointless. Oh no. This is hard-hitting, well-calibrated, evidence-led policymaking. Naysayers who think this smacks of vibe-based policy founded on shaky research that only affects those who don’t vote…wind your neck in.

You can already hear the sound of children lacing up their shoes, ready to throw off the shackles of their smartphone and rediscover climbing trees, cycling to the park, scrumping apples, and whatever else teenagers might have been doing in 1950s America before Mark Zuckerberg ruined it all.

Never mind the fact that when the Online Safety Act’s age checks went live last July, Proton VPN’s UK sign-ups jumped more than 1,400% within minutes. Half the top-ten apps in the UK App Store that day were VPNs or verification tools. AI tools can generate convincing false identity documents in seconds. So I’m told. Apparently. Within months of age checks going live, the House of Lords was debating how to stop people using VPNs. Who could possibly have foreseen this? Aside from..well, everybody. Teenagers know how to use the internet. More breaking news at ten.

Fortunately, Australia are already running this experiment so we can learn from them. Drowning under the weight of free time, their teenagers are now seeing hitherto untold exam success. The only problem their Government currently has is how to manage the ‘good childhood’ epidemic that is now sweeping their nation. Oh wait. No.

After an initial spate of account deletions, the Australian Government has now quietly amended the law to redefine what it was actually regulating, beginning the long hard work of understanding which part of the social media platforms are worth trying to target. Hardly the actions you’d expect to see of a ban that’s been a roaring success. Does the research say that the social media ban has successfully transformed the lives of Australian teens? What do you think?

Fortunately, we’re at least taking some of the things the Australians have learned. Rather than a fixed list of ‘social media’ apps (because of course, there’s no way that teens would switch to different platforms) we’re targeting a specific set of features: “user-to-user platforms, whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside algorithms.” The usual big-hitters (plus YouTube, which has raised eyebrows) are given as examples, and we’re told that Signal and WhatsApp are not intended to be in scope. “Post material, alongside algorithms” is funny. What is eBay? What is Vinted? What is Mumsnet? What does “alongside algorithms” even mean? Who decides what “purpose” a platform has? The devil, they say, is in the conspicuously missing detail.

A monstrous cynic might say that MPs debated this ban in March and it was soundly defeated. And that since March, very little has changed about the evidence base, the extent or depth of perceived harm, and the mechanisms to enforce a ban. In fact, they might conclude that the main thing that has changed has been the local election and a potential leadership challenge. And that, by announcing the policy now but not explaining any of the technical details and suggesting that they’ll all come later, Downing Street has set up a problem that somebody else might have to deal with. Not me, of course. I could never be so cynical.

What would be better than this, then? What does the grown-up version of this look like? We need to be explicit about the actual harms we’re trying to prevent. “Give kids their childhood back” sounds good…but which kids? What version of childhood? We need to be explicit about age and identity verification: how it’d work and what trade-offs we’re willing to make. Simply saying that Ofcom should run a rapid study to work out how to do this makes it sound like a quick-to-solve technical problem. Politicians must know that that isn’t true. Finally, we need to have a societal discussion about what we actually expect teenagers to be doing instead. Would we rather they spend four hours a day talking to their friends online, watching TV, scrolling TikTok, playing at the park or…or what?