Blog

I got this survey from the British Computing Society and felt myself writing an essay so felt the need to publish it as well 😂

I am undecided on a social media ban for under 16s

Teenagers need a safe place to communicate privately to each other and within their circle of friends. They need a space where they feel like it is their own and where there is someone to help them if a situation becomes dangerous. Ideally it should be moderated by people with safeguarding training and that have passed DBS checks. Users outside their age range shouldn’t be able to enrol.

It seems the focus for large social media companies is surveillance for advertising purposes and increasingly steering political opinion.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/meta-whistleblower-sarah-wynn-williams-says-company-targeted-ads-at-teens-based-on-their-emotional-state/

A whistleblower has stated that meta (facebook / instagram / whatsapp ) will detect when a girl aged 13 to 17 is feeling depressed, such as when they have deleted a selfie ,and use this as an opportunity to advertise them beauty products.

If this is the case then they are not fit to moderate our childrens’ communication platform as this is very manipulative, intrusive and exploitative behaviour. There are maby other examples of similar behaviour, this is just scratching the surface.

So while I think there is a purpose for children to use social media I don’t think any of the current offerings are appropriate.

I also think that social media companies will use the legislation as an opportunity to acquire facial recognition scans and legal documents for age verification of adults. The digital ID plan has the potential to be a convenient, private and secure way to verify a user’s age with information the government has anyway. I think clumsy and aggressive messaging about using it to crack down on immigrants has soured expectations.

https://identityweek.net/denmarks-specialised-altid-wallet-for-age-proofing-and-id-verification-in-one-place/

Denmark appears to have implemented this quite well. It should be possible for the government to create an API that with your permission will verify whether your over 18 (or 16) or not. This should be made available to use for free in order to not give further advantage to large comapnies over small communities.

I am not at all confident in the government’s ability to effectively enforce this in terms of technology.

Laws are around for a long time. Technology is ever changing and ambiguous. Conversations about the banning of VPNs have demonstrated a lack of understanding. VPNs are used for multiple purposes but mainly 1) to securely connect to a private network over the internet 2) to tunnel your traffic through a separate connection

There are a lot of ways to achieve both 1 and 2 and they have different strengths and weaknesses depending on usage. There will always be a way around the law if it is too prescriptive. If it is too vague then a lot of useful desired behaviour is senselessy criminalised.

To use an analogy, in an establishment where they serve alcohol, this can be varied as a large concert venue holding 50000 people or a small country pub. In both instances there is behaviour that we want to prevent. In the large venue it’s appropriate to have metal detectors, to search people’s bags on entry and to have a lot of security in the venue, in a country pub you don’t even really need a bouncer (and they may not be able to afford one)

The point is this, the onus is 100% on the platform to prevent these problems and a one size fits all approach does not work. In the event of an incident, it should be considered afterwards whether appropriate preventative measures have been taken and if not the community should be fined or shut down depending of the severity of their negligence.