UK Introduces Full Social Media Ban For Under 16s - Including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨beep@piefed.world⁩ to ⁨unitedkingdom@feddit.uk⁩

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned-for-under-16s-in-landmark-government-move-to-givekids-their-childhood-back

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1196216/uk-introduces-full-social-media-ban-for-under-16s-including-snapchat-tiktok-youtube-inst

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Naich@piefed.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I feel safer already, and I’m 59. Thanks Keir!

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- supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Right this is all about old people feeling safe, it has NOTHING to do with reality and it is shocking people like you are aggressively willing to endorse the destruction of things just because it gives you good feelings.
  
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  - Naich@piefed.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm
    
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tal@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

In a move to protect children online and address the scale of the challenge, the government will also go further than a blanket ban on social media with world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s. These restrictions – which together with the ban go further than any other country – will apply to a wider range of online services, including on gaming sites.

Restrictions on these functionalities will also be on by default for under 16- and 17-year-olds to prevent a cliff-edge at 16. The government will also be looking in more detail at overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18-year-olds and will set out more detail in July.

huffingtonpost.co.uk/…/youth-voters-labour-electi…

Labour risks losing “a generation of young voters” to the Greens and Reform, according to one of its own MPs.

Luke Charters told HuffPost UK that Labour has always been the “party young people backed when it mattered”.

But he warned: “If we don’t show we’re serious about delivering, we risk losing a generation to populists peddling false hope.”

Labour legalised voting for 16 and 17-year-olds, too.

I’m not sure that these are necessarily the most-advantageous policies for Labour to adopt in conjunction with each other, but I suppose that we will see how it works out.

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- supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Wildly undemocratic.
  
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GiveOver@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Extremely happy with this one. I understand everyone’s worries about surveillance and all that, and I agree with a lot of it, but I think in this case it’s worth it. Social media is just that bad.

From my own point of view, I hate hate hate Instagram/Facebook/Tiktok. When my kids get to that age I’d be facing a binary choice of either letting them use it or turning them into the “one weird kid in the class who isn’t allowed insta”. Even if this law is only 25% effective, that’s good enough for me. My kids will be in that 25% not using it, and I don’t have to worry about them being social pariahs.

From a wider point of view, social media is severely fucking up the entire world. I think it’s too much for most adults, let alone kids. No way should kids be on there.

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- BMP5k@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  If we agree social media can be harmful, then why is it an age question and not changing it at its source for everyone like removing infinite scroll. All this does is normalise ID checks for social media so that when the kids are old enough to be on it, they don’t see an issue with assigning their ID to their online activity. At the same time we have people getting arrested for protesting which is meant to be a human right.
  
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- supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Where is your hard evidence?
  
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  - GiveOver@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Where is your hard evidence?
    
    I’m sure you scrolled past plenty of studies that agreed with me when searching for your cherry picked example.
    
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username_1@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
YouTube is… social? I thought it was just a pile of videos.

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- raman_klogius@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  if only there’s a kids version of it… that somehow has even more addictive algorithm than the adult version…
  
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- Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  It has a comment feature
  
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  - username_1@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Almost anything has comments. Even the shops with potatoes and socks.
    
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recursivepickle@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I see no mention of Rumble or Telegram. Are they left out on purpose, or because they have no idea what they are doing?

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- tenebrisnox@feddit.uk ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  How would politicians get their class A drugs delivered if they banned under-16s from Telegram?
  
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- tal@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  They say that they intentionally aren’t targeting messaging services, so Telegram might be exempt.
  
  This would capture user-to-user platforms, whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside algorithms. The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban.
  
  That being said, I’m a little fuzzy on how this is targeting communicating with strangers, since I’d imagine that more people do that via messaging platforms than, say, YouTube:
  
  In a move to protect children online and address the scale of the challenge, the government will also go further than a blanket ban on social media with world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s. These restrictions – which together with the ban go further than any other country – will apply to a wider range of online services, including on gaming sites.
  
  That’s a good point on Rumble, though.
  
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_(company)
  
  Rumble, Inc. is a Canadian-American online video platform, web hosting, and cloud services business[8][9] headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with its U.S. headquarters in Longboat Key, Florida. It was founded in 2013 by Chris Pavlovski, a Canadian technology entrepreneur. Rumble’s cloud services business hosts Truth Social, and the video platform is popular among American conservative and far-right users. Rumble has been described as “alt-tech”.
  
  Rumble received investment from venture capitalists Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance in May 2021, with that round of funding valuing Rumble at around $500 million.[21] In October 2021, Rumble acquired Locals.[22] On December 14, 2021, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced that it entered a “wide-ranging technology and cloud services agreement” with Rumble in a statement that also stated that Rumble would operate part of Truth Social as well as TMTG.[23]
  
  And in that vein, gab.com:
  
  gab.com
  
  You won’t find Gab on the Apple App Store or Google Play. We’ve been banned since 2017 for refusing to censor speech that Big Tech demanded we remove. But you can still get our app on your phone—and it works just as well as any native app.
  
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
  
  Gab is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. Widely described as a haven for far-right and alt-right users, Gab has attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social media platforms and users seeking alternatives to mainstream social media platforms. Founded in 2016 and launched publicly in May 2017, Gab claims to promote free speech, individual liberty, the “free flow of information online”, and Christian values. Researchers and journalists have characterized these assertions as an obfuscation of its extremist ecosystem.
  
  And 4chan, while I’m on that:
  
  www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko
  
  The UK online safety regulator Ofcom has fined the US messaging platform 4Chan a total of £520,000 for failing to comply with various aspects of the Online Safety Act.
  
  It includes £450,000 for failing to put in age checks to prevent children from seeing pornography on the platform.
  
  However, a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won’t pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.
  
  In a follow-up post on X, 4Chan’s lawyer Preston Byrne wrote: “In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment.”
  
  [additional image of hamster]
  
  The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom
  
  Like, if part of the net effect winds up being a transfer of Britain’s children and teenagers from websites that care about and follow British regulations to websites — some of which are hard right — that do not care about British regulation, it will be interesting.
  
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  - recursivepickle@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I’m thinking they might be using the definition from Digital Services Tax policies, which state that:
    
    The social media definition focuses on two key aspects of user participation. An online service will meet the definition when both of the following conditions are met:
    
    The main purpose, or one of the main purposes, of the service is to promote interaction between users (including interaction between users and user-generated content).
    
    Making content generated by users available to other users is a significant feature of the service.
    
    https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/digital-services-tax/dst14200
    
    If that’s the case, then Rumble et al would be banned too. It might just be, that the press release just mentions the most popular ones.
    
    That they don’t intend to target messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Signal (and potentially Telegram) is a bit of a greyzone. Telegram is more social network than messaging app these days, where channels are a huge part of the platform. In fact, it’s such an important part, that WhatsApp copied the Channel feature to their platform.
    
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Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Hopefully it’s the same as Australia where they name specific sites and not generic unclear definitions like the OSA

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