Sir Keir Starmer has declared that social media use will be prohibited for all minors under sixteen.
Genuine question, would this be happening at all if it wasn’t for the Gazan genocide?
I admit I’m not ‘hip’ to the politics in the UK prior to 2023, but was this on the table? In America it started because the government was terrified of China, but was this even being discussed in the UK at that point?
I think the Gaza genocide definitely accelerated the push for more internet surveillance, but this probably would’ve happened regardless with how tech giants are always looking for new angles to monopolize and control the internet.
pushes to do this languished until gaza – and other counter-narratives – became too popular to ignore.
they weren’t started because of gaza and they may have succeeded w/o it; but they clearly did here.
Basically all the tech giants oppose this move, though. This is pure government surveillance and censorship, baby.
I wish I still lived in your fantasy world where the interests of governments and tech giants aren’t fully merged.
Dark Web social media here we come.
yes, but the goal is to make it difficult enough to access that its counter-narratives – like gaza – cease being part of the mainstream conversation.
Good. This will be a good thing.
Uncontrolled social media has a lot of problems but pre-megacorp internet was at least one metric fuckton better than whatever this shit is we have now.
Looks like the UK will need to verify the ID of everyone on social media to make sure what their age is!
Thought the same last time I tried to make a fake Facebook account for marketplace. Then they wanted a 360 video of my head. Lol, closed.
UK will outsource it to Palentir so Palentir can sell the data to every UK policing agency (my guess)
Genuinely the most evil company in existence.
This sort of thing seems to be getting pushed globally recently and I do worry about how relatively little pushback there is from most people.
The Sociopathic Oligarchs have insisted on full surveillance of the Citizens. Larry Ellison said:
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance-oracle-tiktok-deal-social-media/
They intend to track our every move, and expect us to live our lives by THEIR standards.
BTW, when I was checking sources, a few of the headlines characterized it as he “once said…,” as if it were a statement he made years ago, and perhaps it doesn’t reflect his current thinking…
He made that statement last September, at a public conference.
I guess after years of shouting “we need to violate your privacy to protect the children” they governments decided to not care and just ram through these measures despite people opposing them.
u.k. about to have roving bands of hooligans with nothing better to do than the exact sorts of things the people pushing these laws hate
Kids will treat this law with all the respect they’d accord to a locked Lime bike.
So he’s finally turning against Peter Mandelson?
