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Examples I know about include 12-year-olds selling nudes, teen experimentation with alcohol being replaced with cocaine because cocaine is so easily available (the issue is the scale and how widespread cocaine is getting; not that it never happened before), several cases in Norway of 13-year-olds being recruited by the mafia to throw bombs at houses through the internet, violence etc. is up the roof, kids have 4 hours of sleep since they doomscroll all through the night, results in school are trending downwards, university reports that students are increasingly unable to concentrate...
Are there other solutions than bans to social media? Sure. Could this in theory have been fixed by better parenting? Sure.
But parents don't live in a vacuum. Parents and children alike rely on the culture around them.
Social media is a HUGE shift to society, and neither culture nor parenting practices has sufficiently adopted to handle it yet. Slowing the shift down a bit until norms and culture catches up doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Our teens are living through a changing time: peak unregulated social media, that I personally belive is approaching heroin level addiction and damage; covid lockdowns testing the very limits of Piagetian theory; AI in school and outsourcing understanding; very uncertain job market to enter into; possibly the collapse of AMOC; reaching Peloponnesian war level of unstable democracy; the true collapse of idealism, the birth of the mechanical man and the first total spiritual crisis
Our institutions absolutely can not react with the accelerated change, so I think the only thing a parent can do is act as individuals, teach their children, and position their families in the best way they can to weather the storm.
AI romantic partners are coming.
After all many of those harms you listed don't suddenly stop at 16.
Many campaigners see this approach as letting the tech companies off the hook - by removing children from the platforms is removes a key leverage point to get the tech companies to cleanup their act generally.
Obviously it's quite possible the not-so-hidden agenda is simply a political one of 'being seen to do something'.
I see that youtube is on the blanket banned list - which is a bit surprising given they are probably one of the more responsible platforms and it also contains lots of educational stuff.
For under 16 there are tools built in Android and iOS to control and limit usage that parents can use. And at home parents can obviously also take the device(s) away.
If this is built on open standards, so that anyone can use it for free, it would be a big positive step forward for everyone.
Look at how they flipped the switch on Mythos last week - do peope really believe these lunatic governments we’re all currently suffering from won’t go further after they start this? Some of you seem to think they still “ask” nicely... nope, they just do whatever they want now.
This is something government deeply cares about because the business that bought it needs there to be more workers so that the labor remains dirt cheap.
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.
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.
https://xcancel.com/BigBrotherWatch/status/20338777100076117...
A certain type of people thrived in 1970's East Germany too, saying to themselves that it was for the greater good.
It's not yet reached threshold levels that would actually likely see teen usage drop dramatically:
[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.
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.
> "We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban."
YouTube is a bit of a surprise here, but I guess with Shorts they put themselves in the same category as Tiktok, etc.
If "X" is social media then so is YouTube.
They need to break shorts off in to it's own app and create a kids mode account that disables commenting and uploading.
Things move on after perceptions have crystalised.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned...
Native toolkits would use a modal window to make an important announcement. The window would not be resizable and would be dismissed with an “OK” push-button.
The presence of min/max/close buttons on the title bar just shows how out of touch this government is with the modern* world of computing!
The girl is even using a phone. What’s it running? Windows 3.11? macOS 9? FVWM95?
*ie the past four decades of WIMP UIs.
This means much more support for the ban by parents than by non-parents, as the full population average is about 75% support.
Speaking from experience: there is just no usable way to limit youtube to certain types of content, or disable "discovery" UI. Recommendation engine gravity is just too strong. Whatever useful kid/educational content they have is swamped by the ocean of attention sinks.
Shorts only made this worse.
I then show them my playlist on youtube (veretassium, tomscott, redvsblue, pbs eons etc)
they go back to scrolling though shorts right after.
you can lead a horse to water but well...
Admittedly children have ignored well meaning adults trying to educate them for all of history...
Depends. I struggle to follow video content, and do better with text. YMMV.
Without capitalism that resource wouldn't even exist.
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 ...
It's very much lashing out for not having everyone verify their ID online to add to their already privacy invasive behaviour, but then gaslighting the people that it's all about protecting children.
One of the parents who supports it mentioned :
> "We've got to educate why this is happening, and the harm that is there."
Wow gee, wouldn't it have been a good idea to educate your kids about the internet and online ? Those of us who grew up before and during the birth of the internet seem to be better well adjusted because we were aware how it connects people of all kinds, good and bad. Todays kids are just given a phone with unlimited access and sent on their way.
It's not fair on kids, parents should have used the tools available, should have been more attentive to what their own kids were doing. I don't think its far in most cases to say "parents are too busy to monitor everything" There are plenty of tools out there. Apple themseleves have built in protections of useage etc.
I
1. On one side I understand the spirit, but the demographic that is most victim of socials in my experience are 50 yo+. At family dinners, etc, it's them, not the kids, being unable to not be perma distracted by the phone. Even when they are not distracted they consistently need to take photos or show you something on their phone or start face calling somebody.
2. This unavoidably spreads the requirement for ID verification to the whole population, not just kids de facto further advancing government's control of communications.
3. Social medias should've been regulated at the algorithm level. Or, like in South Korea, they could've implemented hard coded daily time limits of usage of the applications.
4. Youngsters will just migrate to platforms that don't fall under the ban making the enforcement.
5. Bans achieve little but further increase the appeal for these platforms. Instead of investing in education for the youth such as longer school days with more sports or cultural activities the government chooses limitations and provides the wrong incentives.
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.
Starmer is an idiot, in every photo of him at some political event etc he always looks like a lost schoolboy with an expression on his face of having walked into a room full of adults and now he's afraid to move lest he be noticed by the big bois.
Granted, all of the other political parties in the UK are inept, corrupt, hapless, ignorant, etc. Reform are a bunch of racists who'll sooner give tax breaks to corporations than actually help the people. Tories are a shadow of their former selves and probably still have delusions that the Rwanda deal was a good idea and not a ludicrous fantasy that should have been an onion article instead of reality. Libdems don't really DO anything, no strong policies and to wont to "go with the flow". Greens are like greens in every country, 90% of their policies make sense, the other 10% are batshit but they're all social environment related and that's a small percentage of required policy - they'd be too afraid to use economic controls.
But the real problem, like everywhere in the world, is the voterbase. Apathetic, sugar/salt/dopamine loving human animals. Can't blame em (us) really, but still - why are we prepared to act all civilised etc when in reality a good chunk of people don't really have any idea what's going on, don't care what's going on and would rather scroll tiktok while eating fastfood and hating whatever group their "tribe" has chosen to hate whilst misplacing their vote while the billionaires become trillionaires.
We (humans worldwide) are falling far below the replacement rate. Global temperatures are still rising. People are still starving even when we have the technology and capital to feed them all.
The Iran war was won online and it's been widely reported the young amoung the military had extreme low levels of morale which had an impact on the battlefield.
Social media is national security threat to our governments and colonialism needs it's foot soldiers.
It is less authoritarian to regulate property than it is to regulate communication. If there is a genuine problem, a non-authoritarian government must apply the minimum level of force necessary to solve it. Jumping straight to suppressing freedom of speech without trying less invasive solutions is pure authoritarianism.