I was pondering a response when Roger at Contains Moderate Peril beat me to it. Thanks, Roger! Saves me having to formulate any kind of reasoned, rational response, something I'm not sure I'd have been capable of, at least not just yet.
Games Industry chimed in after that with an assurance that gaming wouldn't be affected, which I'm sure was the first thing on everyone's minds but kudos for staying in your lane, GI. Rest assured, the kids will still be able to play Minecraft and Roblox, apparently, although there needs to be some clarification on what the exemption actually means. Supposedly it excludes games but not "gaming platforms" and media, so expect to have to supply Google and WordPress some ID any day now, if you want to carry on reading your favorite UK-based gaming blogs.
Seriously, on that last point, I don't see why blogs wouldn't qualify as a form of social media, unless the legislation is only interested in some form of direct messaging, not conversations carried out in public. I guess we'll have to wait for the exact wording, although now I come to think about it, the ban includes YouTube, which I've never even remotely thought of as social media anyway.
Who knows? If blogs really aren't included, maybe we'll see a revival of interest. For a couple of weeks, until they get added to the proscribed list, that is.
I can't make much sense of it yet. Livestreams are banned. But does that only mean livestreams like on Twitch, which have text panels where everyone talks at once in real time? Or is it also livestreams like sporting events or music festivals on Amazon Prime or Netflix or the fricken' BBC, where no-one talks at all and we all just watch like it's television? Who knows what the hell they're talking about. I guess we'll have to wait for the paperwork.
That said, this blanket ban seems like a response on the level of John Major's infamous Dangerous Dogs Act. I was tempted to go a lot further back, compare it to King Cnut holding back the waves, but as we all know, I'm sure, he was trying to demonstrate how he couldn't do anything so ridiculous, not to prove he could. He was trying to make the point that just because he was King didn't mean he could do anything anyone wanted him to do. Our currently elected overlords seem not to have taken that lesson to heart.
I guess, since I'm nearly seventy now (I need to keep saying that out loud in a vain attempt to get used to the idea. I do still have a couple of years to go...), I ought to be able to stand back and ignore this nonsense. It's not going to affect me, after all. Except I'm sure it will. Not sure how, yet, but I'll bet it won't be anything good.
Perhaps the most interesting thing will be to see how the target demographic responds. Are they going to welcome it? Accept it? Ignore it? If it works, will teenagers genuinely feel they've been given their childhood back? And if they have, will they want it?
I didn't think "childhood" was anything most adolescents particularly valued but maybe that's changed. It's been a long time since I was a child or a teenager, although you might not think it to read this blog. When you were in your teens, did you think of yourself as a child? Did you want everyone else to see you that way? I didn't. At least I don't think I did. As I said, it was a long time ago.
And come to think of it, wasn't the current government talking about lowering the voting age to 16? Is anyone sensing a degree of inconsistency?
Oh, well. No point going on about it. It hasn't happened yet. It might never happen. If it does happen it might not work. Anyone from Australia reading this? How's it working out for you over there, so far?
I was going to leave you with a final word from Astryuuna on one of my favorite YouTube channels. She's a lot closer to the target age bracket and although I think she'd probably just escape it, she's having some problems of her own with people trying to tell her how to use the social media and technology she grew up with.
Astryuuna's widely praised for flying the flag for how the internet used to be before it got ruined by a devil's handshake of censorship and commercialism. She's also very NSFW, so be warned. She makes a lot of good points in her latest video, though. She usually does. You don't have to be sane, rational, balanced or reasonable to be right. Or, as the proposed legislation suggests, very, very wrong.
And then I thought, no, why take the risk? She does go in hard in the latest rant. I don't want to get into trouble by association. Which is indicative of how a moral panic gets to you, isn't it? Go look her up yourself if you're interested. It'll be worth your time.
Instead, I'll go out with a nice, safe option. Here's a Voice Of Today saying something vaguely relevant.
Chloe Slater, aged 23, already waxing nostalgic about the good old days of her Southern Youth, although from the video it looks more like she grew up in the '80s. It's not quite jumpers for goalposts but it's not far off. The camcorder's a particularly nice touch.
Cracking song though. I wonder how all the new Chloes out there will get to see videos like that, when YouTube's banned?
Notes on AI used in this post:
Just the two images, both generated through NightCafe as usual, although I'm typing this listening to some songs I made last week on Suno. Does that count?
I made the second image first, using the prompt "King Canute on his throne on the beach with the tide coming in. He's surrounded by sycophantic nobles. Canute is checking his mobile phone to see what people are saying on social media about his attempt to hold back the waves. In the style of a stained glass window in a medieval cathedral." You'll note I spelled Canute the way it was spelled when I was growing up, not the way it's usually spelled now. I don't know why I thought an AI wouldn't recognize it otherwise.
For that image I just used whatever model was in the chamber, which happened to be Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. I was pretty happy with it, too, but when I needed a second image I thought I'd run the same prompt through one of my Pro freebies, in this case GPT Image 2 Low. Blimey, Charlie! It's a lot better, isn't it? So I used that one for the header and relegated poor old Flux to the body. Maybe there is some point to paying a sub after all.
Posts
What on the internet can't be looped in as "social media" given how ill defined the term really is? I saw the obvious ones on a list... but then a couple I didn't expect. I guess YouTube is "social media" in that anybody can upload stuff and comment on videos.
ReplyDeleteAre comments on a site enough to make is social media? Will the dubious wit and wisdom of our blogs be denied to those under 16 in the UK as we allow comments? How about the BBC or The Guardian or other "legitimate" news site that allows comments?
And we haven't even started in on enforcement. You cannot trust the platforms. They already should not allow anybody under 13 due to US law, but that isn't enforced by anything more than you have to lie about your year of birth.
Will people in the UK have to buy an internet license that they will need to use to access the internet?
Fun times.
As I commented on Roger's post, it looks to me as though they've already constructed the narrative where they deflect any concerns over enforcement by framing the whole thing as a statement of intent concerning the kind of society we supposedly all want to live in. That way, all that really matters is the intention, not the outcome.
DeleteLike the US law you mention, we already have legislation concerning age restriction on the internet but it relies on the platform doing the checks and OFCOM, the government watchdog responsible for media issues, issuing fines for non-compliance. So far, OFCOM has not been particularly proactive in this regard and unless the government plans on heavily increasing their funding, it seems unlikely they'll be any more inclined to take action on this extra workload. A lot of laws get passes but not all of them get enforced.
I have actually proposed an Internet License in the past. It seems like such a simple solution. You need a license to drive a car and you have to produce age certification to take the driving test. It would be very straightforward if it wasn't for the awkward fact that every last damn thing in the world is a computer now. You can literally surf the internet on your fridge. Cars conveniently need a road.
Maybe they should just call it a day and switch the whole thing off. I'm sure we'd all get used to doing without it soon enough.
I think it's pretty hard to argue social media hasn't had a devastatingly negative effect on human society, and young people are especially susceptible to its harms, so I support stuff like this in principle. I do agree enforcement is likely to be very difficult and could potentially involve overreach, but I don't think the idea should be entirely tossed based on that.
ReplyDeleteThe Internet license seems like a good idea to me.
I think the issues around the way social media use can affect the way the brain develops are concerning but I'm not sure that's the kind of problem this addresses. This seems to be more akin to a type of moral panic such as surrounds the introduction of most new technologies. In the 18th and early 19th century, reading novels was supposed to be very bad for the mental health of women for example and I grew up with a background assumption by many adults that watching television was harmful for children. It's certainly true - or at least statistically proven - that the mental health in young people has deteriorated over the last decade or so but the reasons for that are much in dispute. Social media is one possible driver for the decline but I find it hard to imagine that stigmatizing its use by age profiling is going to make anyone's mental health improve, especially if it leads to continued but covert use instead.
DeleteHa. Well, that will certainly bring back some of the wild west days of the old internet. If only from training under-16s on how to circumvent and workaround matters.
ReplyDeleteBesides parents condoning it for a particular subset, and kids themselves figuring out ways to spoof being older for whatever detection mechanism is being used... governance and enforcement pretty much always runs slower than discovery and innovation. The next medium will keep popping up and it'll be chasing a moving target.
Has Discord been named yet? Has Twitch? Roblox and Fortnite were where a whole bunch of kids were a decade ago... not sure if they've moved on since then (since I am old and a fossil compared to that group now) but surely any game can turn into the new replacement communication medium. Minecraft alone has dozens of communication mods and plenty of public servers. What's old is new again, people hobnobbing on MMOs?!
And besides games, there are tons of phone apps dropping every hour that many kids will just download and use. (Heyday for malware, I'm sure.)
Then of course, we literally have AI that can vibe-code apps, given context and a direction. Any kid with a modicum of wit and access can simply ask for a copycat-style app of the social media of their choice, pass it to their friends, get their friends to spread it viral-style, and voila. Mini-underground-social media tool with new name for governments to play whack-a-mole with.
It's ultimately just virtue-signaling.
And an inconveniencing roadblock for everyone affected (kids, adults who will be required to prove it, companies that have to add enough token mechanisms to fulfill legal requirements, etc.)
Everyone's against Discord, aren't they? It's probably second only to TikTok as a perceived security threat for some governments. I'm sure it'll be included at some point, if it's not now. The clever thing about the proposed legislation is that it's non-specific. They can add any new app or service at any time.
DeleteRoblox, Minecraft and Fortnite are still the biggest names in play, I think. Fortnite is falling off a bit but not the other two. But they're all games so they're apparently not part of this legislative drive. The idea there is that the game companies are already under legal obligations concerning age that can, if necessary, be enforced through existing legislation. Not to say they are or will be but they don't need to create any new laws in that regard.
The thing about being able to get around the law by jumping onto new services is that for the problems that are being targetted, there needs to be a critical mass. It's not like the terrorist threat where the issue is people talking to each other without anyone being able to see it - this is about people talking to each other where *everyone* can see it. So if the outcome is a fracturing into dozens of smaller platforms, to an extent that will be positive result. I doubt most teenagers are actually that flexible, though. They might all flock to a new service but that can easily be proscribed and it'll be hard to keep that up indefinitely.
That's always assuming there's adequate enforcement, of course. If there isn't, then everyone will just keep on using whatever they're using now.
The problem is not that younglings access addiction fueled money grabs, rather that those money grabs are allowed to exist because they're convenient and have money to spend. Also because forbidding addiction never fixed anything.
ReplyDeleteThe real deal is to provide a better alternative so the lucky ones miss their chance to become addicted, and then deal with the wrecked ones.
A society were people drink, smoke or doomscroll for lack of better alternatives is not societying well.
Younglings are just collateral damage to the real deal of addiction.
I'm not sure spending money is the issue here. It's mostly about the way social media affects brain development, I think. There's plenty of evidence building up about that. If they were totally serious about it, though, they'd need to extend the ban to about 25. The brain doesn't stop developing until then.
DeleteI see I wasn't clear, I meant that social networks act as money grabs for the owners, who gather user data and sell it, and in order to get that data, they use addiction mechanics so the users keep using the media beyond measure. Thus, younglings get addicted because someone is using that addiction as a data gathering tool for profit. Also addiction takes many ways: a girl who's obsessed with impossible beauty tips is also addicted to self-deprecating her own self image right at an age where nobody knows who they are, who they are supposed to be, and how little does mean the wrapping compared to the content. As the quote from "Wear sunscreen" went, "don't read beauty magazines, they'll make you feel ugly". And that was (and is) the point, one to which women are specially vulnerable as they are relentless and vicious judges of their peers and themselves.
DeleteThere are many addictions, and social networks profit from them by allowing others to exploit them.
(And guess what: after discussing a certain medical topic with a "free" AI, I've started receiving spam about miracle drugs/procedures/doctors... coincidence?)