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Whenever you see the words "social media ban" you need to substitute them for "mandatory ID checks for adults to use the internet," because that's the only solution they have to enforce the ban for children.
We don't want to provide our IDs so that we can be associated in perpetuity with every brain fart that we post to MySpace or whatever people are using these days.
Online pseudonymity is important for a functioning democracy. When people fear consequences for expressing their political opinions, this leads to the chilling effect.
The ban is not about children, it's about everyone, and it's about our freedom to speak freely online.
If it's done like Australia, it'll only be for big tech platforms. If you care about privacy, you wouldn't use them anyway.
It's not about privacy it's about the government getting involved in private citizens business and using the justification of "think of the children" as an excuse.
I'm all against the ban but a separate government run app that checks your ID and only passes a "yes/no" to an app requesting if the user is an adult is a valid way I think? That's at least anonymous and the only data is a useless boolean.
It sounds simple when you're not a mathematician or cryptographer, but the academic study of these systems reveals that it's probably intractable:
Privacy-Preserving Age Verification and Its Limitations - Steven M. Bellovin
Cory Doctorow wrote an article shortly after this paper released that explains the situation quite well: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers
Yes that would be the best way to implement it. But that requires effort on the part of the government and they ain't going to do that so instead they're just going to give the contract over to some company that totally 100% definitely deletes the photos after verifying. We've heard that before.
Then can I ask why you’re against the ban? We know that social media has a negative effect on children, we know they have particular difficulty stopping use on their own, and we know that kids are very often more tech savvy than their parents, so a ban from the parents won’t necessarily be effective. My primary concern with bans has been the privacy incursions, but if that’s out of the equation, it seems pretty similar to age-based tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, or gambling restrictions to me.
I’m well aware that politicians try to make these bills seem reasonable though, so there’s a good chance I’m missing some of the consequences. I can also understand (though respectfully disagree) if you’re just maintaining consistency and you’re also against other age-based restrictions.
Edit: at least one of the obvious drawbacks is that YouTube is included, but I’m still interested in the inherent negatives about an ideal bill
Weed isn't legal to buy in the UK, so we can ignore that one, as you don't need to use ID.
As for tobacco, alcohol and gambling, these are based on "If you visually look under 25 years of age, we'll ask for ID to prove that you're over 16/18 etc".
If you go into the shop, and visually look 30 or 40 years old or whatever, no ID is required.
If you show ID, the person in the shop looks at the ID, then gives you it back. The interaction ends there.
They don't care what your name is. They don't store the ID. They don't record that "this person with this ID bought these things". They don't create a database of who you are, what you buy and cross reference it with other things you do, places you go etc. They don't follow you home and see what you do with the alcohol/tobacco/gambling - they leave you alone, none of their business.
Online scanned ID is stored, databased, cross-referenced, attached to online accounts, bank accounts, mortgage accounts etc permanently.
Say for example, "Reform" become the next UK Government. In local councils, they've been trying to ban/cut funding to/actively oppose "gay stuff", "woke stuff", "trans stuff" and "autistic stuff". They want to crack down on things like "women's rights", "trans rights" etc.
Suppose that's our next Government?
Suppose they've got a database of passports and photos and addresses of everyone who's ever said or done anything gay/"woke"/autistic/trans?
Was it worth it?
Instead of just putting fucking parental controls on admin accounts on phones and computers?
I’m sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. I’m well aware of the privacy concerns and that’s the main reason I don’t support these bans.
The person I was responding to suggested that they could be implemented without privacy infringement, but they still didn’t support them, so I wanted to know their reasoning.
Ah, got you. Apologies for my rant :)
No worries, it’s kind of a silly question, because there’s definitely no “ideal” version of this ban, but these bills have such significant propaganda associated with them, I’m interested if there are other big problems that are more hidden.
I don't think sheltering people from something teaches anything. People are resourceful too so probably won't be long until there's a workaround. And enforcement costs a lot of money. Just don't think it'd work.