I saw a headline on a UK tabloid paper yesterday, alleging that the majority of people in the UK support a social media ban for under 16s.

There is a proposal for this before Parliament at the moment, and I think that it has some fundamental flaws.

## A proposed legislative amendment to attempt to ban under 16s in the UK from common messaging services, sharing family photos, using Wikipedia, and doing much else online, by imposing age assurance on everyone

https://decoded.legal/blog/2025/12/a-proposed-legislative-amendment-to-attempt-to-ban-under-16s-in-the-uk-from-common-messaging-services-sharing-family-photos-using-wikipedia-and-doing-much-else-online-by-imposing-age-assurance-on-everyone/

#OnlineSafetyAct #children #SocialMedia

@neil maybe instead of "social media ban under xx yo"
We should go for a shorted version aka: "media ban."
Wouldn't it work better just to ban everything?

Internet

Phones

Newspapers

TV

/S

I am unconvinced that, as a matter of policy, banning under 16s from social media is sensible / appropriate anyway, even if these flaws were addressed.

@neil Thoughts...

a) For a lot of kids I suspect some of these services are their main point of social interaction with their peers and (distant) family members - I'm assuming there's no intent as part of this to provide alternative social spaces for kids (e.g. youth clubs)

@neil it's so poorly thought trough as a strategy one wonders if they really are that thick or is this not for the stated purpose

On a related topic, a visitor left a copy of The Daily Telegraph here over Christmas and oh my... No wonder some people hold such perverse, uncaring worldviews.

@neil @srtcd424 it used to be a newspaper in my living memory.

@bloor @neil Believe it or not I read it regularly for the quality of the news reporting, if not the politics, back in the 90s :(

@neil

He/she would not be welcomed into my house ever again.

@neil as a parent to teens (who also fall into other minority groups) I am getting increasingly tired of this government trying to control how I raise them.

I'm doing my best, with what I have, for the specific individuals in my care. The government haven't a clue what that actually looks like or why, but they keep trying to interfere and constrain. And they keep telling me it's for my children's welfare when I can see the blatant direct damage.

@neil

Most of the harms related to teens accessing these sites come from the engagement-at-all-costs models that drive algorithmic content presentation. This, in turn, is driven by the need to fund these sites with advertising.

A ban on all advertising (in any medium) targeting under 16s would probably do a much better job.

@neil this survey presupposes that those under sixteen are not "people", i think.

@david_chisnall @neil ban commercial social media for everybody. Nothng with ads, nothing with pay to play, donation only.

@neil this does not explain why anyone would let a newspaper replace their own thinking…

@RogerBW @neil

I would be in favour of a complete and unconditional ban on profiling-based ads. Ads that are selected based on the content that they are placed next to are okay (not great, but less harmful), ads based on any information about the target other than ‘they are a person reading this article’? Nope.

@neil could be worse.... have you seen the daily mail. 😱

@RogerBW @david_chisnall

> ban commercial social media for everybody. Nothng with ads, nothing with pay to play, donation only.

I am very sceptical of this. It entrenches power in favour of rich people / companies, and those with other sources of income.

@david_chisnall @RogerBW

One might also need to be clear about what constitutes an "ad".

Personally, I enjoy seeing people here posting about their own small businesses / things that they have made. Marketing, but advertising? I don't know.

@neil @RogerBW

I don’t think any posts here are based on profiles of the users. I have almost zero information about the audience for any post here. That would be fine under my proposed ban. It is similar to an ad in a newspaper: the ad reaches the kind of person who reads that newspaper, but I have no fine-grained control.

And, almost as importantly, I can’t limit who sees the ad. One of the big problems with these platforms is that they can give two people completely different ads for the same target, with contradictory information. If I put an ad in a Mastodon post, anyone can boost it and anyone can see it. If it’s something divisive aimed at the biases of a narrow set of people, it will be visible to a load of people with the opposite biases. In contrast, on Facebook I can buy an ad with pride flags that targets gay people and an ad with homophobic messaging that targets far-right people, and neither sees the other unless someone goes to the trouble of screenshotting it and then shares it and the algorithm doesn’t suppress it in the other group.

@david_chisnall @RogerBW

> I don’t think any posts here are based on profiles of the users

Yes, I agree, and yes, it sounds like people promoting their own stuff would fall outside the scope of your thoughts here.

@neil
Like has been said before nothing is as motivated as a kid who's being stopped from doing what they want. An alternative (even less visible and managed) way will be found.
Pushing the interactions into dark sites is potentially higher risk.

Still agree that social media as a thing is out of control. Manage how they operate and not how it's used.
Early days Twitter/Facebook/Myspace/Google+ were great as the user curated. Not anymore. This is the issue.

@david_chisnall @neil That can still destroy the medium, though. Big Corp advertises regularly in newspaper. Newspaper relies on advertising money. Big Corp says "shame about that article you're planning to run on our CEO's swastika fetish, we'd have to withdraw our ads".

@neil Funnily enough my son (12) is heavily in favour, whilst I’m entirely unconvinced - talk about weird family dynamics 😁

(FWIW he doesn’t have social media, but he’s annoyed that his friends spend so much time on it.)

@neil as someone broadly in favour of this but also who spent his teenage life on Queer Youth Network I’d appreciate discussing this with you (or someone who follows you who is interested and knowledgeable in public policy) to probe the space a bit and encounter new arguments for and against

@Buster Let's have a chat some point!

@neil I feel that you get a very different question deepening on how you phrase it.

As you say - "ask every adult to go through age verification for every messaging service" is far less likely to be supported than "protect kids from bad internet thing".

And as always, I would rather see more education, and perhaps social media somehow encouraged to be better somehow, than bans which leave 16 years olds totally unprepared for reality.

@jetlagjen @neil As a parent I want tools and advice, not rules and laws.... 😾

@neil that would be interesting, as I refuse to participate in age verification. 🤔

@revk @neil there's always a Yes Minister quote...

https://youtu.be/ahgjEjJkZks?si=kCVHmNUMbKfqewff

@neil I mean, they've already blocked teenagers from getting help and knowledge from the Internet that may support them at their most vulnerable time around subjects such as depression and their sexuality.

Why not go further and remove any method of social connection from them.

Unfortunately my MP has jumped on the "think of the children" bandwagon, without actually thinking of what the children need.

@srtcd424 @bloor @neil so did I, though I'd dare not buy a copy now.

@neil It’s worrying to me that we only hear about the harm it’s doing and not that it also gives marginalised groups ways of connecting and supporting each other 😞

@neil I'm not sure how the UK one compares to the recent rollout in Australia but it was a colossal failure.

- VPN usage skyrocketed
- Less-known social networks not covered in the ban went to the top of the app store
- Teens largely carried on as if nothing had happened

I'm not really adverse to kicking anyone off algorithmic social media but it's the lifeblood to that generation and they're going to scoot around like every previous generation has.

@serpentroots The Australian ban covers specific sites; the UK proposal covers a huge range of services.

@neil 💯

@neil Daily Mail? If so, it was just them taking a break from stories about either the royal family or the dambusters raid.

@neil I just read the original blog post above. I can't see how that's enforceable in any way. If the Australian model was circumvented within minutes, the UK one stands no chance unless they get all China on their ISPs.

@serpentroots Quite so.

@neil this thread has prompted me to write an email to my MP. I find Mastodon keeps prompting me to such rash actions as trying to engage with the democratic system. I'm sure no good will come of it.

@david_chisnall @neil And to do it without an age check they would have to ban ads for everyone 🥹

@rhelune @david_chisnall

That might depend on how "targeting" is interpreted?

To me, "targeting" sounds different to "not showing ads to children", and more like "not advertising things specifically for children" and "not using the fact that someone is a child as a criterion for showing the ad".

In any case, I prefer David's proposal of no targeted ads *at all*, but permitting contextual ads based on page content.

@neil or am I reading it wrong and they simply don't care about enforcement? Do they just want a legislative cosh to go after whoever they want on an ad-hoc basis?

@serpentroots

My feeling is that the drafters of this proposed amendment are unfamiliar with the scope of their own proposal.

At least, that is the most charitable interpretation I can make.

@neil My first thought when I saw that was 'who did they poll, how many people was it, and what question was asked'.

I wasn't prepared to buy the paper to find out.. although I'd not be surprised if it turned out to be 100 members of mumsnet.

@neil @david_chisnall Sweden has this:

"§ 4. Advertising during a TV broadcast may not have as its objective capturing the attention of children under 12 years of age.

§7, para. 3. Advertisements may not come immediately before or after a program or a portion of a program which is oriented primarily to children under 12 years of age, insofar as there isn’t any question of messages addressed in § 8 [JB: § 8 deals with “unsponsored” transmissions, e.g., public service announcements]."

Guess under 12yo are not supposed to be online unsupervised 🤷

@neil
Agreed . Ads for toys, candy etc designed to appeal to children, or next to content for children would be banned.
@rhelune @david_chisnall

@neil the last section of the article is hilarious

@neil @RogerBW @david_chisnall it's ridiculous that the 2019 evidence used to support this, explicitly says

"Scientific research is currently insufficiently conclusive to support UK CMO evidence-based guidelines on optimal amounts of screen use or online activities (such as social media) "

If they had more recent evidence they should state it, along with a statement of the harms they are trying to prevent.

@megaeggz Thank you :)

@david_chisnall @neil serving ads as a business model is kinda wild when you think about it. You’re basically admitting you built something interesting but not worth paying for and you’re too lazy to make it genuinely compelling.

@bexelbie @neil

When I was a student, I played an online game called Urban Dead. One thing struck me while playing: the game was ad supported, but most of the ads were for other online games that were also ad supported. So where did the money come from? Game A shows an ad, gets some money, uses it to show an ad on game B. The small number of ads for things that were not themselves ad supported were the only way money was actually entering the system. And, because each game’s revenue was based on the number of ads it could show, there was a strong incentive to advertise more to bring in more players.

This spiral worried me. When you enter a market with a ‘free’ ad-supported offering, it’s hard for other players to compete. They have to convince users that their product is worth more than the ‘free’ one. Paid offerings will be squeezed out by free ones. But, when an industry shifts from being mostly paid to being mostly ad-supported, the money entering the ad ecosystem decreases. Over time, the number of companies able to pay for advertising with money that didn’t come from showing ads decreases. Worse, it concentrates in either exploitative or luxury markets, which are less able to be replaced by ads. This places a lot of control in the hands of a small group.

Quite aside from the social impacts, I remain convinced that ad-supported industries are an economic disaster.

@neil

Was it the vegan?

@david_chisnall @neil while I agree that these companies are behaving poorly, don’t forget users are making it work. If people didn’t want ads, they’d pay even in the face of a free option. It’s just that market sizes are smaller when you charge vs go ad supported.

That makes us also need to toss some “blame” at investors. When we started valuing on things like market size and not business success also encouraged this.

This won’t be solved with a law

@bexelbie @neil

Part of the problem is that users don’t see the costs of ad-supported offerings. It’s easy to understand the cost of a service that costs £10/month. But what is the cost of a service that uses your interactions to build a profile of you that it then uses to try to subtly psychologically manipulate you?

A functioning market requires buyers to understand and the costs and benefits of goods and services on offer. As such, no market-based solution can work here, it requires legislative or regulatory intervention.

@neil they're barking at the wrong tree.
Youngsters need social, physical or virtual.
What they're trying to protect them from is not social media per se.
They should look into the origins of the real shit that is being distrubuted and used (exploitative business models, addictive algorithms that promote shit people like tate, blind eye moderation etc), or even deeper, give parents enough time to be with the children.
(imho after raising 3 kids, who are even more critical to the above than me)

@david_chisnall @bexelbie

> If people didn’t want ads, they’d pay even in the face of a free option.

And often they are not given that option.

Facebook, for instance.

Or our local news site, where a paid subscription still shows ads.

Or else there is the option, but it is *even more* money, such as Amazon Prime, which added ads to an already paid-for service.

@neil if we go under 16 id say we should also go above 60, or like with a driving licence, you need to pass a test proving you're still able to filter out misinformation

@david_chisnall @bexelbie @neil Yeah, I've never understood the business model where free games carry ads exclusively for other free games.

@neil make IRC great again!

@david_chisnall @bexelbie @neil I think the phrase is "taking in each other's laundry".

I've got an essay brewing in my head on the evil of advertising that I might get round to writing someday... I think the key is that advertising is a negative sum game. If you spend money advertising you get more of the pie, but that money could have been spent investing in a better product and growing the pie. And advertising is experienced by consumers as a form of pollution.

@neil @david_chisnall @bexelbie I simply don't trust most of the people who do offer paying for no ads to make that mean "we aren't selling your data" as well as the more obvious "we won't display ads in your sessions".

@neil I'm really not sure what the authors hope to achieve with this.

I think it will also lock out a lot of people from these services, because I already get shut out of sites that mistake me for a bot. How many age verification services will unintentionally fail to work with assistive technologies? Will they be forced to protect the data they process? What if someone finds a way to impersonate others (of course they will)?

This protects no one and will bring significant harm to many.

@womble It is ill-considered, IMHO.

@neil @david_chisnall @RogerBW

Well, in some way it's kind of self selecting isn't it, people who are following your profile are mostly going to be people who are interested in stuff you do or write about, and when they share something at least when I do it's because you think it would be something that people like me would be interested in. So while it's not a tracked profile, the way the network gets built out makes it kind of hit a very specific niche of people ::)

@sotolf @neil @david_chisnall I'd argue that that's the key distinction: the thing that people coming from commercial social media say is sooo haaard, that there isn't a big trendsetter they can rely on to tell them what's cool and what isn't. is exactly why this place is great.

@neil the cynic in me suspects that the real reason for it is to remove any hint of anonymity from social media users.

@neil its like banning pedestrians, because they walk in the way of speeding cars.