The UK Government’s proposed social media ban for under-16s punishes children for the crimes of corporations.
Tech companies such as Meta have for well over a decade been documented participating in the manipulation of our electoral systems, our media ecosystems, and our minds. Instead of legislating to protect the public as a whole from these harmful practices, the ban simply uses this as a pretext for a new level of mass surveillance, and a new revenue stream for the private corporations that process our personal documents for age checks.
Consent for this has been manufactured through, among other things, a public consultation that included obviously manipulative survey design, with questions such as “do you agree that adults should do more age checks, if it means children are safer online?” You could do this very obvious rhetorical move with anything. “Adults should speak Latin with one another, if it prevents children from hearing things that may harm them”, “Adults should sacrifice the blood of a goat at every solstice and equinox, if it keeps children safe from evil spirits”, perhaps even “Adults should overthrow capitalism, if it means children are safer”.
Rather than keeping children safe, the ban threatens to send any particularly determined young person into underground, less regulated online spaces, which will further fuel a rise in extremism and empower predators. More than 60% of children in Australia are still able to access social media despite the ban; they’re just doing so in a more secretive and less supervised way.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I imagine that in the mirror universe, where good intentions prevail and worst-case scenarios are hypotheses rather than predictions, a better government is developing a programme of activities to foster a better internet for everyone. Here are three examples of things that I imagine our benevolent doppelgangers might be creating.
Local, community-run, adult-supervised online services
We denizens of the bad place seem to have taken for granted that online services that connect people to one another must be owned by, and run in the interests of, massive tech corporations. We give them far too much credit; too few people tell the history of the internet as autonomous grassroots movements to create useful resources for specific communities, such as the rise of BBS boards and IRC channels in the 1990s. In discussions last year about the Online Safety Act, questions about community-owned federated services such as Mastodon servers were met with bewildered waffling - it seemed that Ofcom knew that these existed, and also knew that the law had not been written with this in mind, but at the same time needed to retain the right to prosecute a webmaster running a service that causes a large amount of harm despite its small scale. This has put people who run small services in a precarious and somewhat frightening position, despite these exact people potentially holding the key to making internet use safer for everyone.
When I think about how a reasonable adult keeps their child safe in any space, IRL or virtual, a key question is who is supervising the kids, and whether you trust them. It has been clear for a long time that nobody should be allowing Meta or Roblox to act as babysitter, given their history of fostering mental illnesses and child labour exploitation. Online spaces that host young people should either be run by a trusted adult, or by paid, professional digital youth workers. They could be managed by schools, libraries, charities, or informal local groups.
Handing some responsibilities to young people after they turn 18 could be a significant boon to media literacy and digital skills; moderating online communities quickly teaches you about how to have clean arguments, how manipulative speech functions in day-to-day life, and how to maximise agency over the tech tools that you use. Services can be created using a wide variety of tools and platforms, some of which are open-source and highly customisable to the needs and interests of a small community. Co-design and participatory design approaches become almost second-nature at this scale, creating a highly democratic digital space that allows young people and adults alike to develop valuable citizenship skills.
Community-run digital youth spaces are not a lofty aspiration. I’m on a private Minecraft server that has strict rules allowing children to play only if one of their trusted adults is also present either virtually or in person. It means operating at a much smaller scale, even than other community-run services. Anyone using ActivityPub for a youth group should only federate with a select group of other trusted servers, and continuously monitor the safety of the other servers in their network. It also means that someone in the community or the government has to cover the costs of these services, as with any physical community space; in this scenario, advertisers get very little opportunity to profit from the attention of young impressionable minds. Youth workers should also receive proper training and compensation. Many people are not used to paying for these things in the digital world, or having to apply for government funding to support them, but is it really more costly than offering up your children as assets that big tech can sell to advertisers?
Regulating addictive and manipulative design patterns
The consultation survey demonstrated that the government is well informed on some of the leading issues with addiction-by-design in social media apps. They used the more neutral term “persuasive design”, and I understand that there are significant problems with the use of the term “addiction” since tech products don’t directly interface with our neuro-receptors (yet - who knows what Musk’s minions may eventually create). However, I think the term “persuasive” suggests that a system has been designed with a particular rhetorical intent in mind, which gives these corporations far too much credit. Yes, they act intentionally, but they are too amoral and nihilistic to envisage any specific rhetorical purpose to the things they create. The only message is (to channel Bo Burnham) “consume more of everything, consume all the time; consume anything at all, we don’t care what it is, as long as you do it here.”
Design patterns specifically called out in the consultation included infinite scrolling, autoplaying videos, and content recommendation algorithms. A recent ruling in California also included push notifications and likes as examples of “compulsive” design patterns that have harmed young people’s mental health. Since these have already been identified, why aren’t they being regulated as a matter of urgency? Legislation should at the very least require that all users are given the ability to turn these features off, or better yet, ban them entirely. Safety-by-design should be mandatory in all products that are designed to be used by the public, including social media apps.
This approach would be fundamentally different to the foolhardy attempts to control substance abuse disorders by criminalising users. Humans have a fundamental need to connect with one another and seek out information. If you ban individuals from accessing these things, they will find other ways to fulfill that need. In contrast, although addictive design patterns probably simulate some kind of real neurological imperative, I doubt that a ban on content recommendation algorithms would force significant numbers of people to seek out illicit sources to score the perfect cadence of cute animals, ragebait, and ads. Its not the quality of the algorithm that keeps us locked in, but the network effect of everyone and their dog having signed up with a corporate service provider long before it showed its true face.
Funding a mental health renaissance
Nevertheless, as with drug policy, harm reduction should be paramount. We’re being told that young people have soaring rates of anxiety and that nobody knows why, but it must be those damn phones. I agree that corporate app design is having a deleterious effect on the mental health of all users - and, with the forced introduction of LLMs, now their cognitive abilities are under assault as well. But to attempt to solve the mental health crisis by cutting people off from one another is beyond absurd - it’s potentially disastrous. If the UK government bans social media use for a group already facing isolation at unprecedented levels, it will need to mobilise an army of mental health practitioners to ease young people through the transition to whatever the next phase of youth socialisation will look like (what will it look like by the way? Presumably we’re not aiming to go back to the 1990s and early 2000s, when there was a moral panic about youth street gangs and teen pregnancy rates.)
Unfortunately, we already know that an obvious and predictable need for increased mental health services is unlikely to provoke any UK government into meaningful action to meet that need. We have known for many years that in addition to the stress of lockdown, COVID causes neurological damage and mid- to long-term loss of functioning, which naturally leads to mental health problems - why hasn’t the 2020s seen a wave of new programmes covering the cost of training and hiring large numbers of counsellors and therapists? Even though it only represents a small portion of claims, we’re being told that a rise of anxiety is fuelling a massive increase in benefits spending - however, any chronically ill person can tell you that “anxiety” is the first diagnosis you get when you’re still trying to persuade your doctor to properly investigate your symptoms, which likely have a neurological or other systemic cause. So, where is the funding to increase the number of GPs and give them more time with patients so that they can properly diagnose people who have been labelled with anxiety? And when the primary issue really is mental illness, young people wait so long to be seen that they often age out of these services before they reach the top of the waiting list, landing on an adults' list that is also impossibly backlogged. This is all the worse if by this time their mental illness has developed into something considered too complex for the “Talking Therapies” service, a cognitive-behavioural hammer that treats every patient like an identical nail. With all this concern about young people’s anxiety levels, why is the government not increasing funding for severely underresourced children’s mental health services?
Whether we ban social media or not, a massive expansion of mental health care is desperately needed, with a wider variety of approaches and a close integration with physical health. I imagine that in the mirror universe, trained and supervised digital youth workers are able to spot signs of mental distress early and signpost young people to local services, who will see them promptly and work with them to identify a therapeutic approach that best suits their needs. Young people who are being victimised by cyberbullying receive mental health first aid immediately, and since mental health services are adequately supported, the bullies are also able to receive appropriate care to resolve their issues with aggression and boundaries, without this taking any resources away from victims. But when cyberbullying happens in our world, we focus our ire on the medium, paying little attention to what the message might tell us.
Implementing any of these recommendations would of course cost the government money, and lose them political capital with infuential tech corporations. This runs counter to present-day orthodoxy, which sees our government spending £billions in order to curry favour with AI boosters. If we can do that, then are we really so poor that we can’t afford to pay youth workers to manage gaming servers? To echo their own biased consultation, wouldn’t any cost be worth it, if it means that children are safer online?
