On Wednesday, the House of Commons will passionately debate which form of internet censorship to usher in: a total social media ban for under-16s, or a blank cheque for ministers to impose broad internet controls at a later date.
The aim, as it so often is in a nanny state, is admirable: to protect children from the many potential harms on the internet. Few will disagree about the direction of travel. The problem is that the destination we are hurtling towards is not some safe, walled garden of children playing nicely in the Metaverse. It is a scrap heap of authoritarian internet controls governed by digital ID checkpoints, where we are all less free and children are no safer at all.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is now locked in “ping pong” on this fraught issue. Yet the extraordinary implications for the freedoms of all 68 million internet-connected Britons have barely been acknowledged so far. Rather, the debate is stuck between a broad church of parliamentarians led by Conservative peer Lord Nash who want to impose a total social media ban for children, and the Labour Government that doesn’t want to concede such a major policy to the Opposition, but that does want sweeping internet controls.
The Government’s proposals are eye-watering: ministerial powers to single-handedly impose national age (and as such, ID) checks for all of us online to manage controls including browsing time limits, internet curfews and restricted features. The powers can be exercised if they address a “risk of harm” to children. As we know from the debates about the censorial Online “Harms” Bill (later passed as the Online Safety Act 2023), politicians have treated “harm” as a dustbin term for adults and children alike into which inconvenient and controversial speech can be thrown. In recent years, the notion of psychological “harm” has been invoked for speech relating to climate, Covid, protests and migration to name a few topics, paired with calls for restrictions and censorship.
If anyone thinks that such broad censorship powers will be limited in practice by British common sense, think again. In the UK, police arrest 30 people a day for online posts. Over the past decade, police have recorded almost 150,000 “non-crime” hate incidents – that is, lawful speech. Already, the online safety act has resulted in the censorship of Reddit threads discussing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, posts about Fantasy Football teams, and images of a Goya painting. The idea of sweeping internet controls being put at the tip of a ministerial pen under the banner of preventing “harm” isn’t child protection – it’s a censor’s charter.
The elephant in the room is that, whether MPs choose the social media ban or the censorship blank cheque, both routes are imposed via age checks – and that means digital ID checks for the British population. The death of anonymity online means there will be less freedom – less whistleblowing, less comedy, less debate, less honesty. A compromise in all adults’ freedom and privacy might be, for some, a price worth paying to protect children – but as a YouGov poll showed this week, the majority of us know the age checks won’t actually keep children off social media anyway. Despite the recent social media ban in Australia, new research shows the majority of 12 to 15-year-olds still have access to social media accounts. The internet is fundamentally an anti-censorship machine – children will find a way around the obstacles.
Britain’s so-called “internet safety” measures are getting more extreme. A few weeks ago, Apple restricted the internet freedom of all its UK users – over half the population – unless they complied with age and ID checks. Owners of iPhones and iPads that failed to prove they are over 18 now have child-locked devices. The company has not publicly discussed why, but it is widely understood to be a pre-emptive response to the UK’s direction of travel towards online checkpoints. The only other countries in which Apple has introduced similar device restrictions are South Korea and Singapore – countries without a free internet.
In the moral panic about internet harms, the population is being infantilised as a whole and losing our freedom on the way. Internet use should be restricted for children – but by their parents, over half of whom don’t even use the extensive parental controls Apple and others offer on their devices. Displacing these parental responsibilities onto the Government gives way to checkpoints and controls not just for children but for the British public as a whole – and we may find we’ve lost our liberty for a promise that was never going to be kept.
– Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch Director
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If anyone thinks that such broad censorship powers will be limited in practice by British common sense, think again. In the UK, police arrest 30 people a day for online posts. Over the past decade, police have recorded almost 150,000 “non-crime” hate incidents – that is, lawful speech. Already, the online safety act has resulted in the censorship of Reddit threads discussing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, posts about Fantasy Football teams, and images of a Goya painting. The idea of sweeping internet controls being put at the tip of a ministerial pen under the banner of preventing “harm” isn’t child protection – it’s a censor’s charter.
The elephant in the room is that, whether MPs choose the social media ban or the censorship blank cheque, both routes are imposed via age checks – and that means digital ID checks for the British population. The death of anonymity online means there will be less freedom – less whistleblowing, less comedy, less debate, less honesty. A compromise in all adults’ freedom and privacy might be, for some, a price worth paying to protect children – but as a YouGov poll showed this week, the majority of us know the age checks won’t actually keep children off social media anyway. Despite the recent social media ban in Australia, new research shows the majority of 12 to 15-year-olds still have access to social media accounts. The internet is fundamentally an anti-censorship machine – children will find a way around the obstacles.
Britain’s so-called “internet safety” measures are getting more extreme. A few weeks ago, Apple restricted the internet freedom of all its UK users – over half the population – unless they complied with age and ID checks. Owners of iPhones and iPads that failed to prove they are over 18 now have child-locked devices. The company has not publicly discussed why, but it is widely understood to be a pre-emptive response to the UK’s direction of travel towards online checkpoints. The only other countries in which Apple has introduced similar device restrictions are South Korea and Singapore – countries without a free internet.
In the moral panic about internet harms, the population is being infantilised as a whole and losing our freedom on the way. Internet use should be restricted for children – but by their parents, over half of whom don’t even use the extensive parental controls Apple and others offer on their devices. Displacing these parental responsibilities onto the Government gives way to checkpoints and controls not just for children but for the British public as a whole – and we may find we’ve lost our liberty for a promise that was never going to be kept.
– Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch Director