What kind of class teaches 'tech-illiterate' parents to help their children not succumb to a multi-trillion dollar industry pushing out addictive and damaging content? It should be easy to develop such classes right? Maybe dust off the classes for 'health-illiterate' parents that were needed to stand up to the tobacco and alcohol industries? </s>
It is heavy handed on the wrong side. How about heavy-handed regulation of the Social Media platforms? Not content regulation, but operations regulation. I'm pretty sure bots and ai-spam can be both easily flagged and banned, something that would have a positive impact for minors and adults alike. But the platforms won't do it, because these drive engagement and keep their stock value up.
Also, including the mid-teens (15-16) into the regulation may have a generational negative effect. This is the age you start to get interested in the world and how it works. Social Media is the primary medium teens use to get this information, having eclipsed traditional media (magazines, tv shows, radio shows etc.) Banning Social Media for these ages leaves a gap in newer generations maturing to adults.
But maybe that's by design? I.e. make new generations indifferent to the world around them, and also prevent them from building resistance to (home) propaganda spread through Social Media.
The only thing that worries me here (although I'm not in UK; but if this practice will get adopted worldwide...) is how exactly the social media platforms will verify the age of their users. Pretty common worry these days, I guess, but I would rather not use any social media, including "needed" ones like LinkedIn, than give my passport to hell knows which third party or parties.
Oh yeah, and what about BlueSky, Mastodon and similar? Can they afford age verification? I'm pretty much sure they will be considered "a social media platforms" as well.
Wow. Sorry to say that, but a few more steps in that direction from UK government - like blocking "non-compliant" platforms and/or banning VPN services and blocking VPN protocols entirely - and you will have a Western Russia here in terms of censorship. Maybe even worse... I'm feeling sorry for you; no irony or sarcasm intended, honestly.
I'm not the UK government, so how would I know for sure? I'm just making some assumptions, no more than that.
One common route that comes to my mind is this: block [something-dangerous] for children, then implement age verification for [something-dangerous], then use it as a tool of censorship. It's way easier to identify and track individuals based on their passport/ID/driving license than based on their email, IP address or even phone number. And then you're getting jailed for posts somewhere on BlueSky or X or on any other social platform because they were hate speech/disinformation/discrediting the armed forces (the last one is the real thing in Russia, and I just see the UK as the country which goes the same path) - while actually you was just criticizing the actions of people in power.
And you can also legally ban and block platforms, services and even software which doesn't satisfy the requirements of age verification.
That's how I see it; that is, I repeat, my assumptions and thoughts. I have never, never in my lifetime (which is rather short though) seen such proposals turn out to be good.
I think it's absurd to say we're anywhere near Russia, a literal dictatorship. Russia blocks almost all Western and independent media, blocks or throttles Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp. People who discredit the military can be jailed for 15 years. This is all based on the Russian government's own opinion on what is "dangerous".
Conversely, social media is widely established as posing severe risks to children and teens. Heavy use is strongly linked to mental health issues, addiction, and disrupted sleep. It's not that different from banning the sale of hard drugs.
One 'better option' would be to hold parents more responsible for crimes that their children commit. And to broaden the types of abuse that the state can respond to—if parents let their children habitually drink alcohol to excess or smoke tobacco underage, social services tend to get involved.
Another 'better option' would be to prosecute tech companies that intentionally create addictive, harmful content.
Banning social media use for anyone unwilling to hand over their secure information to private third-parties seems like one of the 'worst options' to me.
> hold parents more responsible for crimes that their children commit.
Oh yeah, punishing children for mistakes they need to make to learn not to make them and moving responsibility from parents to the government sounds like a great idea.
They were talking about actual serious crime, like the 13 year old knife murderer in Glasgow, who will undoubtedly have "previous".
(There's a bottom 5% of kids whose parents are basically completely negligent or actively abusive, and they end up causing basically all of the problems)
A significant part of the brain rot involves full adults. Elon Musk is openly advocating riots in Northern Ireland; several people have been firebombed out of their houses.
> Musk wrote, “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!”
I'm certainly not defending the man, but that comment to me is definitely not plainly seen as "advocating riots"... I'd call that a very disingenuous stretch of the truth.
If we're going to criticize people, I think we need to do it for the right reasons.
The exact opposite logic gets applied against supporters of Palestine such as Sally Rooney, who was threatened with a total ban on her (unrelated) work until the High Court ruled in her favor.
"Thick" is presently unclear: a lot of money and an existing competent team can hide a lot of damage upstairs; and it's not implausible that he has done that damage, even just because he is known to have sleeping difficulties[0], and sleeping difficulties are known to correlate with IQ impairment, and that's aside any questions about ketamine (between the war on drugs and AI SEO, I have no idea what that stuff really does).
There are options that don't involve forcing everybody to prove their age and provide ID verification to access social media