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.
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.
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!”
I’d sadly probably find a different addiction.
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.First of all, Don’t blatantly lie about the very thing you are linking to. It is not listed as social media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#Decentralization_and_open_standards
“While the dominant social media platforms are not interoperable, open source protocols such as ActivityPub have been adopted by platforms such as Mastodon, GNU social, Diaspora, and Friendica. They operate as a loose federation of mostly volunteer-operated servers, called the Fediverse.”
The problem isn’t me wrongly referring to Lemmy and Reddit and other forums as social media. The problem is pretty much the entire world doing it. So until that gets fixed, it’s probably best not to call for the destruction of social media.
Just cause lots of people call something X, doesnt mean its X.
Otherwise Trump would be a literal god. And web forums would actually be social media.
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
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
Any government that oversteps so much that it thinks its role is as the parent, must be abolished.
Let them eat guns and cigarettes.
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
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??
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.
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.
This is based, adults next.
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
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.
Fuck Keir Starmer
Considering youths are the most prone to protest, this is not about their protection at all
RIP Minecraft live lol
I fully support the battle against attention-consuming energy vampires but I’m afraid this is probably not going to work practically.
Apparently they count Youtube as social media
No more SML for British kids.
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
