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> “Children will be given back their childhoods,”

As a parent, I completely agree. We need to protect children from the dangers of the completely uncontrolled "jungle" of social media. But above all, we need to give children back the right to experience a true, real childhood, made up of true friends, fresh air, friendships, and real relationships!

> As a parent, I completely agree.

What's stopping you from doing this so far? Handing a child a smartphone is a decision parents can make, withholding access to a smartphone is also a decision parents can make.

I'm not in favor of these social media bans, but I would think the benefit here is that without the ban your child will be in the "real world" while everybody else's is on social media. This would make the "real world" socialization benefits more difficult.
Enormous, unrelenting social pressure? A crying child telling you that they're completely cut off from their peers and social group? Day after day of arguments and pleading? Schools and scout groups and extra-curriculars that tacitly require your child to have a Facebook or WhatsApp account? And much much more!
You don't have children, do you? Being a know-it-all in an area you know nothing about. Denying a phone to one child is to isolate them among their peers. Denying it to all makes them equal again.
It sounds like you're assuming a few things: 1. Where you've written "smartphone", you're using this as a proxy for social media, which is what this legislation purports to target. 2. aledevv is a parent. 3. aledevv has, for whatever reason, not withheld access to social media (I'm taking "smartphone" as a proxy for "social media") for their child. 4. What aledevv said they agree with is state-level restrictions on social media for children.

Please correct me if any of the above is a misunderstanding.

If the above are representative, then what I believe you've overlooked here is a the much more difficult issue:

Parents have power over children, at least up to a point, and many platforms provide help with exercising that power. Apple and Google provide some means to restrict social media access which place control in the hands of parents.

Parents do not, normally, have power over other people's children. Parents can influence in-person social circles, somewhat, but without withdrawing children from all situations where they interact with other children, including school, social media's influence upon a parent's children is still very strong via the indirect route.

When a child goes to school, attends a group activity outside of school, or socialises in real life with friends outside of school, there are always children in the groups they meet who either use social media themselves or have older siblings, friends or parents who use social media themselves and who influence those children themselves.

To be clear, I'm not giving any opinion about what's proposed here by the UK government. I wanted only to object to what looks like an oversimplification that makes a false assumption that parents have a level of control and influence that they really don't.

Same argument goes for cigarette and alcohol. Withholding access to them is a decision a parent can make. Are you for allowing children to purchase them?
They will want a smartphone if their friends have it.
Maybe they are already doing it. But they're allowed to want the same for others too.
This could start if we became less worried about kids being kidnapped or whatever and actually let them out.

Kids have less freedom than ever.

Controversial, but I think that giving to everyone a computer connected to the internet - be it PDA-sized or any other form - was a mistake, and everything happened so fast that no one could control what was going on.

I say it was a mistake because for the generation grown with BBS and 14.4k modems the dangers of an open network were evident and real from the start, even if at the time they were minuscule in comparison to now. Those born with an always on, always connected device already in their hands lacked this awareness from the start.

> “Children will be given back their childhoods,”

On one hand, i agree fully.

On the other hand I'm worried about how controlling and orwellian/totalitarian the UK is becoming under Starmer.

Because they're all going to go outside and skip and run and jump and skim stones rather than sitting in a darkened room playing Fortnite.
Have you not discovered piehole or child controls? My kids stuff is completely locked down it was not hard. I don't need the state to be involved.
And that law ensures this? Really?

Reminds me of the prohibition era.

Feels heavy handed, but the brain-rot seems to be quite real, so I don't see a better option.
Parents taking responsibility for what their children can see and do on their devices is an option. Maybe free classes for tech-illiterate parents?

There are options that don't involve forcing everybody to prove their age and provide ID verification to access social media

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.

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.

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.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/belfast-riot...

Targeting kids is a distraction from making the difficult choice of confronting powerful adults.

If I was someone under the age of 16 in the UK I would absolutely attempt to circumvent this ban myself; and I'm happy to contribute to software that facilitates kids in the UK circumventing it.
Good. This will force kids to be creative, hack around, and question authority.
Headline makes it sound like this has taken effect. It's just been announced

Might start taking effect in spring 2027

> Ofcom, which has powers to enforce online safety regulation, will conduct a rapid study on what is effective age assurance for verifying whether someone is over 16, while it is being asked to publish a “clear enforcement strategy.”

Just so we’re all clear about what this particular social media ban is about. It’s about adults, and connecting a real name and face to online activity at the state-issued identification layer. I’m generally supportive of things like banning smartphones from schools, which is certainly an option the UK could’ve pursued, but this is coming at a time when social media is getting the blame for behavior of adults. Much easier to limit politically annoying voices of citizens when they have to authenticate through the state before logging in to speak.

> “Children will be given back their childhoods,”

Taking options away from children will not make their lives better just by itself

And this social media ban might only move the conversation to less transparent channels

WhatsApp and Telegram know more about children than their parents

And child can still spend all doing unhealthy stuff. YouTube kids is addictive enough, at home watching Netflix, playing video games, tablet/phone addictive games...

So the only real solution is force companies to provide better parental controls, maybe aided by AI

And force companies to add better controls/defaults for the population in general to reduce addictive features

> So the only real solution is force companies to provide better parental controls

Parental controls require parents. Many "parents" don't seem to be interested. So in my opinion the only real solution is to get parents to parent.

As an aside: > Taking options away from children will not make their lives better just by itself

As someone who grew up with fewer options, I disagree. It was precisely because I had so few options that I explored (both physically and mentally).

I'm guessing that as an adult I'm going to have to show my passport / drivers licence or something else to go on YouTube now? Stuff that.
So much ambivalence.

On the one hand: _Some_ kind of action is long overdue. For once "protect the children" is actually a valid argument (we should protect the adults too, but baby-steps ...).

On the other hand: Technical people can see this is going nowhere good.

YouTube seems a little much. Plenty of examples of bright kids who learn coding or electronics at a very young age, no doubt having access to YT is a big part of it.

Hmm I guess those kids would use their parents account or something like that.

Social media in it's current state is harmful. So I'm all for this.
The mandatory age sniffing will soon start as well.

After all, the government wants to watch everyone, to verify your age now. Gone are the days of anonymity - they want to know your every move.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48527766
This should be a parental decision, not a governmental one. UK parents are just offloading raising their kids.
Parents aren't responsible for the harms caused by social media services.

It's the operators who are responsible, and it's the operators who have the tools and resources available to reduce or mitigate those harms. So it is clearly they who should have taken action.

But they haven't, and so here we are.

It should, but sadly most parents don't seem to be interested in parenting. This is the next best thing.
I think it's reasonable for governments to signal a decision like this that parents can ultimately choose to bypass. So it's both to explain the harms and posture to reduce those harms to children, and to leave the final decision to parents.
Social media platforms are offloading detection of harmful content and algorithms to UK parents.
I grown up in the 1990s, so as a teen I had access to the wild west of the decentralized internet in all its scary glory. It was pretty cool.

But nowadays as a parent I see, instagram, tiktok are much more scarier for the damage they make psychologically and mentally to our kids. And with the AI slop it's only going to go downhill. So yes, it's a great decision, and other countries should follow the lead.

I presume I'll be forced to dox myself for free to use those platforms?
Of course, that's the whole point. Gotta prevent another Belfast.
Digital ID by the backdoor is here.

Couldn't get it through the first or second times, just dress it up in "think of the children" rhetoric and run it from the Ofcom quango.

ok, now guarantee that they get a library within walking distance, a bicycle a place to use it, and keep it, brick and mortor stores that have kids stuff for hobby and interest, parks, playgrounds, and police that call them "mam" and "sir", or, or, wait just keep them inside with an electronic monitoring device that cuts them off from there peers.
Huge win for surveillance capitalism. If Agentic AI is the future of online interaction, shopping, etc., a signal of "this is a verified human being" is golden to advertisers.
It's also a huge win for children's future and cognition.

Both of these things can be true. We need to figure out how to navigate this new reality and no action was getting really dangerous.

https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken
...by ID checking everybody. Big Tech loves this.

> Google Wants to Be the ID Checkpoint for Europe’s Internet

https://reclaimthenet.org/google-wants-to-be-the-id-checkpoi...