Social media ban for under 16s

[PTR 444]

The BBC is reporting an article on the topic of banning social media for under-16s, following in the footsteps of Australia.

Peers urged to vote social media ban for under-16s

Lord Nash proposes raising the age limit in a change to a draft law making its way through Parliament.

www.bbc.co.uk

Peers in the House of Lords have been urged to vote in support of a ban on social media for under-16s in the UK.
Lord Nash, a former schools minister, has proposed a change to a bill, which would raise the age limit for users of social media. The legislation will be debated later on Wednesday.
It comes amid calls for the UK government to follow Australia in imposing a social media ban for young people - the world's first - last year.
But some campaigners and children's charities have opposed the move, which Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has not ruled out.
Earlier this week, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced a "swift" consultation on measures to "keep children safe online" and seek views on the effectiveness of a ban.
It will assess the merits of a ban for under-16s, as well as overnight curfews and actions to prevent "doom-scrolling".
It would also look at whether more robust age checks could be implemented by social media firms, which could be forced to remove or limit features "which drive compulsive use of social media".
And England's education inspectorate, Ofsted, will give tougher guidance to schools to reduce phone use - including telling staff not to use their devices for personal reasons in front of pupils.
Conservative peer Lord Nash argued there was no need for a consultation, partly because polling showed "the vast majority of parents want it".
"There is a huge volume of evidence in academic studies around the world that show quite clearly that excessive use of social media is damaging to children's health," he told the BBC's Today programme.
He said his amendment proposed "highly effective age verification".
"The social media companies are perfectly capable, and have told me this, of putting in place highly effective age verification."
He added: "We're just asking for a few more years for children to mature so that they do have to deal with social media at 16, they're more likely to distinguish fact from fiction and they can make better judgements."
Lord Nash's amendment to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill has been co-sponsored by Labour peer Baroness Berger, Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Benjamin and independent crossbench peer Baroness Cass.
However, if the amendment passed in the Lords, it could be overturned in the House of Commons by MPs at a later stage.

Personally i'm mixed as to whether a complete ban is the correct approach. I definitely agree that under 16s (and potentially under 18s too) need to be protected from the harmful effects of social media at a time when they are still developing both mentally and socially, but at the same time, these children are going to be using social media in their day to day lives once they become responsible adults. I think a better approach would be that anyone between the ages of 13 and 18 can use social media, but only with a restricted "child" account which is linked to the account of a parent or legal guardian. This would allow them to message close friends, browse reputable pages and share photos, with any activity being vetted by the parent before being approved. They can also set daily time limits, with 2 hours per day the recommended amount.

Such measures should also be combined with mandatory ID verification upon creating an account, and a ban on personal devices inside schools. Schools should however let pupils use school-owned smart devices for educational purposes.

In reality, I don't think the issue is social media as such, but more children spending increasing amounts of time unsupervised and tech companies exploiting this reality.

 

[styles]

I think the difficulty I have with a lot of this is how easy it is to bypass.

When I was in my first year of high school, a few of us who went on the PCs at lunch got frustrated that any website with a game on it (indeed any web page with 'game' or 'simpsons' in the <title> element) were blocked. So I created a PHProxy website and chucked it on a free web host. I wrapped the entire content of the page inside an <iframe> to get around the silly <title> blocking as well. Now, I don't expect many young teens to be that into tech to do this, but the thing is you only need one person to do it and share the knowledge.

Much like the pornography block the UK has. 16 year olds are just going to download a VPN app, set it to Romania, and boom.

There's been talk of devices which have firmware on them locking down what can be done on them. This is all well and good, but you can get a touchscreen smartphone on Amazon for £45. That's less than the price of some Xbox games.

I'm sure the next thing will be the government requiring VPN providers to require ID, but we go full circle almost to my high school experience, where you'll just get someone who hosts a proxy in Romania and share the details with your mates.

I'm in support of what these policies are trying to achieve, and I'm not wholly against the policies, but I remain unconvinced that the legislature works fast enough to keep ahead of such workarounds.

 

[nw1]

I think the difficulty I have with a lot of this is how easy it is to bypass.

When I was in my first year of high school, a few of us who went on the PCs at lunch got frustrated that any website with a game on it (indeed any web page with 'game' or 'simpsons' in the <title> element) were blocked. So I created a PHProxy website and chucked it on a free web host. I wrapped the entire content of the page inside an <iframe> to get around the silly <title> blocking as well. Now, I don't expect many young teens to be that into tech to do this, but the thing is you only need one person to do it and share the knowledge.

Much like the pornography block the UK has. 16 year olds are just going to download a VPN app, set it to Romania, and boom.

There's been talk of devices which have firmware on them locking down what can be done on them. This is all well and good, but you can get a touchscreen smartphone on Amazon for £45. That's less than the price of some Xbox games.

I'm sure the next thing will be the government requiring VPN providers to require ID, but we go full circle almost to my high school experience, where you'll just get someone who hosts a proxy in Romania and share the details with your mates.

I'm in support of what these policies are trying to achieve, and I'm not wholly against the policies, but I remain unconvinced that the legislature works fast enough to keep ahead of such workarounds.

Reminds me of a little game (albeit using much more primitive techniques) we played with the teacher who managed the school computer network when I was in the sixth-form (this was comfortably in the 20th century, for point of reference - let's say 455s were around, but so were EPBs) involving the Worm (aka Snake) game.

Several of us were playing the game. The teacher got annoyed and removed the link to it from the desktop (this was a very early version of Windows, IIRC - possibly Windows 2.x).

However we found it in a directory on the C: drive. Started playing the game again.

The teacher then removed it from the C: drive.

By that time, several people had copied it to floppies...

 

[Bletchleyite]

I've voted for the last one, but it isn't really introduce new measures to limit childrens' use, rather I would completely prohibit algorithmic social media by amending the Data Protection Act to ban outright the collection and processing of personal data for the purposes of targeting media of any kind, including advertising, delivered online to an individual or group of individuals, with the exception of where that media is regulated by OFCOM (which would still allow BBC iPlayer and newspapers to target articles to you on their websites).

Aside from maybe introducing AI based porn detection (which isn't hard to do) to block that to under 18s, social media really wasn't a problem when it was reverse chronological of the people you already follow, maybe with a few suggestions of who to follow based on who those people follow to make building up your list of friends easier.

 

[D365]

Such measures should also be combined with mandatory ID verification upon creating an account, and a ban on personal devices inside schools. Schools should however let pupils use school-owned smart devices for educational purposes.

As we are witnessing first hand from the Online Safety Act, the third party identity services that have been bought in to undertake age verification are proving (not surprisingly) to be a target for hackers.

Exhibit A: the data breach of a third party service provider for the messaging platform Discord:

Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, says official ID photos of around 70,000 users have potentially been leaked after a cyber-attack.

The platform, which has more than 200 million users worldwide, says hackers had targeted a firm that helped to verify the ages of its users but the Discord platform itself was not breached.

People can provide ID photos to verify their age on Discord - a networking hub for players to chat and share files with others in the gaming community.

The leaked data may involve personal information, partial credit card details and messages that were exchanged with Discord's customer service agents, the San-Francisco-based company says.

No full credit card details, passwords, or messages and activity beyond conversations with Discord's customer support agents were leaked, the firm said.

All impacted users have been contacted and Discord is working with law enforcement to investigate the matter, it added.

The platform said it has revoked the customer support provider's access to the system that was targeted in the breach. Discord did not name the third-party company involved.

A representative from Zendesk, a customer service software provider for Discord, told the BBC that its systems had not been compromised and that the breach did was not caused by a vulnerability within its platform.

Some online commentators have claimed that the data breach was bigger than Discord has revealed.

A spokesperson for Discord told the BBC that those claims are inaccurate and "part of an attempt to extort payment". The spokesperson said the breach was not a ransomware attack.
"We will not reward those responsible for their illegal actions," the spokesperson added.

Nothing that I have seen in within OSA or the latest proposed amendment serves to hold online services (social media platforms or otherwise) accountable for the sensitive data that they are now forced to process.

And that doesn't even begin to consider the implications of GDPR non-accountability for service providers based in entirely different continents.

I'm sure the next thing will be the government requiring VPN providers to require ID, but we go full circle almost to my high school experience, where you'll just get someone who hosts a proxy in Romania and share the details with your mates.

This could be another discussion in itself - whether the prospect of mandating user identification for VPN service is remotely achievable.

 

[yorkie]

I think the difficulty I have with a lot of this is how easy it is to bypass.

When I was in my first year of high school, a few of us who went on the PCs at lunch got frustrated that any website with a game on it (indeed any web page with 'game' or 'simpsons' in the <title> element) were blocked. So I created a PHProxy website and chucked it on a free web host. I wrapped the entire content of the page inside an <iframe> to get around the silly <title> blocking as well. Now, I don't expect many young teens to be that into tech to do this, but the thing is you only need one person to do it and share the knowledge...

I don't think you'd get away with that so easily on school PCs these days, however I know for a fact that some schools allow students to access open source games (there are really good multiplayer games such as OpenRA, ioQuake3 etc), and/or relax the filtering rules based on during lunch break, after school clubs, so they are less easily bored at those times. Some schools also have Minecraft servers.

I think kids these days generally accept they can't access social media at school, but you are quite right that they would find ways round it on personal devices.

Also, whatever sites get blocked to under 16s, then notwithstanding kids finding ways round it, the problem would also go to other sites/platforms. For example, Roblox has a poor reputation for online safety, but isn't part of the ban in place in Australia.

A ban wouldn't actually address the root issue.

As we are witnessing first hand from the Online Safety Act, the third party identity services that have been bought in to undertake age verification are proving (not surprisingly) to be a target for hackers...

Yes, this was foreseeable, but the sort of people who advocate for such bans are not interested in such inconvenient truths.

 

[PTR 444]

I've voted for the last one, but it isn't really introduce new measures to limit childrens' use, rather I would completely prohibit algorithmic social media by amending the Data Protection Act to ban outright the collection and processing of personal data for the purposes of targeting media of any kind, including advertising, delivered online to an individual or group of individuals, with the exception of where that media is regulated by OFCOM (which would still allow BBC iPlayer and newspapers to target articles to you on their websites).

Aside from maybe introducing AI based porn detection (which isn't hard to do) to block that to under 18s, social media really wasn't a problem when it was reverse chronological of the people you already follow, maybe with a few suggestions of who to follow based on who those people follow to make building up your list of friends easier.

I do agree with both statements. Social media was much less intrusive when it was just messaging and sharing life moments, without the added pressures of seeing content you never asked for, both for children and adults.

 

[D1511]

I heard an interesting testimony from a 14 yo Australian girl (Sophia possibly) and her dad on Radio 5 breakfast yesterday....about 7.50am if anyone wants to listen back on the BBC Sounds. She spoke very eloquently on her experience of the ban.

She said she didn't know a single person in her peer group who had lost any access to their social media sites of choice at all. Not a single one. She mentioned that she had passed some sort of Snapchat facial age verification thing at the third attempt, after putting on a bit of make up. But she also said some of her friends on Tik-Tok didn't have to do any kind of verification at all and their access to social media was completely uninterrupted.

So I've voted for the last option, as this 'ban' is clearly ineffective, and the enforcement is seemingly non-existent.

Edited to correct facts on the platforms concerned, after re-listening to the radio segment.

 

[Trainguy34]

Realistically, people will always find loopholes and bypasses, so IMHO it would be worth just focusing on the worst bits and getting them right instead of an all out ban which is much easier to bypass.

 

[AlterEgo]

Always daft to follow the example of Australia. Culturally not a convict nation but rather the nation of jailers - they are really quite addicted to banning things, like when they locked out their own citizens for a couple years and banned them from returning because of Covid. @Bletchleyite probably has the best solution.

 

[brad465]

I've voted for the last one, but it isn't really introduce new measures to limit childrens' use, rather I would completely prohibit algorithmic social media by amending the Data Protection Act to ban outright the collection and processing of personal data for the purposes of targeting media of any kind, including advertising, delivered online to an individual or group of individuals, with the exception of where that media is regulated by OFCOM (which would still allow BBC iPlayer and newspapers to target articles to you on their websites).

Aside from maybe introducing AI based porn detection (which isn't hard to do) to block that to under 18s, social media really wasn't a problem when it was reverse chronological of the people you already follow, maybe with a few suggestions of who to follow based on who those people follow to make building up your list of friends easier.

This would solve a lot of problems with social media for sure. This might, for good and/or bad, lead to the unintentional closing down of many social media sites without having to ban them, as the companies will not make anywhere near as much money and thus won't be viable. As has been well said before, "if you're not being charged on these sites, it's because you're the product."

 

[Railwaycat]

You've all missed one of the reasons for this proposed ban - the disruption that social media causes in schools.

BBC Look North (East Yorks and Lincs) covered this topic on Monday (or was it Friday....), speaking to teachers - it's a major problem, and the only way to deal with it would be for pupils to hand their phones in at the start of the day and get them back when they go home.

 

[yorkie]

You've all missed one of the reasons for this proposed ban - the disruption that social media causes in schools.

BBC Look North (East Yorks and Lincs) covered this topic on Monday (or was it Friday....), speaking to teachers - it's a major problem, and the only way to deal with it would be for pupils to hand their phones in at the start of the day and get them back when they go home.

The use of phones is already banned within schools, and I don't think there is that much covert use of social media sites during school hours.

As for the time wasted collecting phones... this doesn't seem a good idea to me.

 

[318266]

Exhibit A: the data breach of a third party service provider for the messaging platform Discord:

Nothing that I have seen in within OSA or the latest proposed amendment serves to hold online services (social media platforms or otherwise) accountable for the sensitive data that they are now forced to process.

And that doesn't even begin to consider the implications of GDPR non-accountability for service providers based in entirely different continents.

The Discord breach, alone, was a result of someone hacking the support ticketing software used to handle requests when Discord (as they do frequently) falsely bans users suspected to be under the age of 13, and is unrelated to any OSA legislation. That being said, they are also taking their "age group verification" fairly wide.

The issue with all of the AI facial scanners is that they only really work on their training data, which being based off the internet as it is, will be mostly photos of standard looking middle class white Americans, and will therefore trend towards inaccuracy regarding really any other group of people, so they are largely useless. They are only allowed I generally ascertain because Starmer trusts AI much more than any sane person ought to.

 

[Cdd89]

I'm ambivalent toward the primary effect but strongly against the likely consequence of requiring everyone accessing social media from the UK to prove their age.

On the topic of workarounds, the government should be wary of throwing away a good thing. Restrictions are currently light enough that, for many people, it's not their while to find ways around the blocks. Broader restrictions would cause VPNs to become essential, at which point the ability to limit exposure to the extreme stuff (as well as to track down many "stupid criminals") goes out of the window.

 

[Bantamzen]

The use of phones is already banned within schools, and I don't think there is that much covert use of social media sites during school hours.

As for the time wasted collecting phones... this doesn't seem a good idea to me.

I was always kind of in favour of a system to collect phones during school hours. But if it isn't that much of a problem, then maybe just leave things as they are.

As for a social media ban, nah that just goes too far. Social media for all it's ills, can still prove to have some useful and positive outcomes. What perhaps needs regulations are how the tech companies use the algorithms to provide content. It would be perfectly possible to simply legislate for different algorithmic models, one for kids, one for people who want to avoid certain topics, and one for access all areas as it were. However this may well mean the end to the free services that users enjoy at the moment, and lead to a subscription model instead. And that might just turn out to be a good idea in the long run, if social media platforms allow the nuttiest of political and conspiratorial theories to fly about unchecked, people may vote with their bank accounts & gravitate towards ones that are a little less like the asylum in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest".

 

[DarloRich]

I'm in support of what these policies are trying to achieve, and I'm not wholly against the policies, but I remain unconvinced that the legislature works fast enough to keep ahead of such workarounds.

Cynical response: The legislation is designed to be seen to be doing something rather than actually doing something practical.

I also support the aim of the policies - social media is a massive problem for people who lack, or have not yet had the chance to, develop the critical skills required to grade and sort information presented on those platforms

 

[bleeder4]

You have to be 13 to have accounts on most of the social media sites anyway. If someone 12 or under is on social media then the fault is with the parents/guardians of that child. And it does usually begin with the parents. If the kid sees their parents always on their phones looking at social media then of course they're going to do the same. Parents need to lead by example.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Cynical response: The legislation is designed to be seen to be doing something rather than actually doing something practical.

We must do something.

This is something.

We must do this.

Same with all Starmer's other hare-brained ideas, such as the Online Safety Act and the idea that younger people would be prohibited from buying cigarettes for the rest of their lives.

 

[Statto]

The issue is, those who are tech savvy will get around any ban (& young people are becoming more & more tech savvy), like those currently using VPNs ecc, to watch Saturday 3pm Football.

 

[Bletchleyite]

We must do something.

This is something.

We must do this.

Same with all Starmer's other hare-brained ideas, such as the Online Safety Act and the idea that younger people would be prohibited from buying cigarettes for the rest of their lives.

Add to that any "somebody's law" - they are always victim driven reactionary legislation that follows that principle.

 

[Tetchytyke]

If someone 12 or under is on social media then the fault is with the parents/guardians of that child.

It's not that simple.

My child's tablet is very heavily locked down and I have to approve anything that goes on to it. But you wouldn't believe how long it took me to set everything up in such a way, and I largely know what I'm doing.

And then, every so often, something gets updated and that something which was locked down suddenly isn't. That's a Roblox speciality, they do it all the time, but Google have also done it after a software update.

I would completely prohibit algorithmic social media

I'm not sure how you can prohibit it, but yes, that is the real issue. Social media where you get a chronological (or even a curated) list of posts from people you know is fine. But the real issue is the endless scrolling which is a feature of TikTok and Instagram.

I'm not sure how you'd make it watertight, but actually I'd like to see social media publishers become financially responsible for reimbursing anyone who is scammed by an advert on their platform. If Meta had to make the victims whole you can bet your bottom dollar that scam adverts would dry up overnight.

 

[150219]

Reminds me of a little game (albeit using much more primitive techniques) we played with the teacher who managed the school computer network when I was in the sixth-form (this was comfortably in the 20th century, for point of reference - let's say 455s were around, but so were EPBs) involving the Worm (aka Snake) game.

Several of us were playing the game. The teacher got annoyed and removed the link to it from the desktop (this was a very early version of Windows, IIRC - possibly Windows 2.x).

However we found it in a directory on the C: drive. Started playing the game again.

The teacher then removed it from the C: drive.

By that time, several people had copied it to floppies...

This and the @styles reply perfectly capture the problems with legislation. My reply is prompted by the fact that @nw1 is exactly what happened at my school too.

 

[SuspectUsual]

Let's be pragmatic.

We can't reliably prevent under 18s buying alcohol in shops where they have to be physically present, so expecting us to reliably prevent underage use of online stuff is absolute pie in the sky.

 

[jon81uk]

Need to actually make parents more responsible and check what their children are up to really. I think there does need to be more restrictions for under 15s maybe, but it needs to be centred more around parental responsibility.

 

[yorkie]

I was always kind of in favour of a system to collect phones during school hours. But if it isn't that much of a problem, then maybe just leave things as they are.

I believe many schools say they must not be seen/heard, i.e. can be left in bags. If they are seen/heard, then confiscated until the end of the day. Others have a system of "pouches" that disable the phones, but that's a great expense and can be circumvented.

The issue is, those who are tech savvy will get around any ban (& young people are becoming more & more tech savvy), like those currently using VPNs ecc, to watch Saturday 3pm Football.

On average, young people are becoming more savvy at using tech, yes.

However, as a lot of tech is becoming increasingly "dumbed down" to the end user, I do not believe that young people are becoming more savvy at really understanding how tech works. It is very unequal and very heavily dependent on a wide range of factors, such as if they are interested in tech, their parents interests/encouragement, access to tech that allows tinkering, what subjects they study (e.g. Computer Science) etc.

Yes a lot more kids these days have an understanding of basic coding, thanks to software such as Scratch, but you will equally find many young people have a poor sense of data security, e.g. inadequate passwords, letting friends know their passwords, not locking unattended devices, etc.

Need to actually make parents more responsible and check what their children are up to really. I think there does need to be more restricted for under 15s maybe, but it needs to be centred more around parental responsibility.

It sounds good in theory, but how do you propose to do actually do that? Have you encountered some of the parents of the most troublesome kids?

 

[adc82140]

My son's school has the Yondr pouches. Yes, they could be opened, but the punishment at the school for doing this would be severe. There is also an element of trust built between the students and the staff, and as it stands that trust is paying off, to.my knowledge there is not an underground phone culture there.

As for social media, he's nearly 12 and as yet hasn't shown an interest beyond WhatsApp chats with his friends. He says Tiktok is for girls (!), Facebook is for old people like me, so that really just leaves SnapChat to worry about I think.

 

[jon81uk]

It sounds good in theory, but how do you propose to do actually do that? Have you encountered some of the parents of the most troublesome kids?

This is a slightly extreme example, but where a child gets involved with someone or something online they shouldn't be, I think the parents should be equally responsible. Consider the Netflix drama Adolescence, the child is rightfully punished but should the parents have been more aware of what is going on? Should they also be arrested for endangering others by allowing their child the ability to do that?

 

[yorkie]

This is a slightly extreme example, but where a child gets involved with someone or something online they shouldn't be, I think the parents should be equally responsible. Consider the Netflix drama Adolescence, the child is rightfully punished but should the parents have been more aware of what is going on? Should they also be arrested for endangering others by allowing their child the ability to do that?

There would be a lot of arrests, given the large numbers if children involved in things they shouldn't be.

What do you actually then do when you arrest them?

 

[Railwaycat]

The use of phones is already banned within schools, and I don't think there is that much covert use of social media sites during school hours.

As for the time wasted collecting phones... this doesn't seem a good idea to me.

Banned in theory, but in practice? The interviews with teachers showed this wasn't the case (don't think this report is still available on i player). Incidentally, probably because nothing much happens in East Yorkshire, this Look North tends to cover (well) a lot of subjects that are relevant countrywide - plus the banter between Peter Levy and Paul Hudson the weatherman is the best comedy show on the TV!

As for collecting phones I agree, unworkable.