Why the social media ban could affect everyone

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:11Despite being targeted at under-16s, the social media ban is going to affect everyone in the UK who uses the internet. This is why.

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1:4710-year-old. As for any response from Downing Street, well, I imagine it will be pretty similar to what the PM said when launching the policy. The need for action could not be any clearer. Social media is making our children unhappy and unsafe. Even the grumpy 10-year-old would concede that kids should always be safe online. But having thought about it, I just wonder if we've all forgotten something pretty important. And it's that for the ban to work, it's going to require everyone over the age of 16 to give up some of their privacy. Will Garrett is a tech journalist who's long focused on online safety.

2:26Will, always great to have you on the podcast. And so much to talk about on this particular topic. Let's start with the basics, though. What has the government announced and why? Well, the government has announced the restriction of social media platforms, firstly, for under 16s from an as yet unannounced date for early next year that's going to be platforms like Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and YouTube and there's uncertainty around certain other platforms so Blue Sky isn't mentioned in their list I've heard the tech secretary saying Blue Sky is in the list so there's still a little bit of uncertainty over what's actually in the banned list but also the government has said importantly that for the first time ever kids aren't going to be able to use chat within game apps and game services to chat to strangers.

3:16That's going to be switched on as default now rather than being a parental option. And there's also some also slightly nebulous guidance around sexualized and romantic chatbots at the moment. Young people under 16 are going to be banned from using those. There was also some talk about curfews for 16 to 18 year olds after 10pm. I've also heard after 8.30pm and I've also heard the tech secretary again this morning say they're going to announce something on that in July, despite it not being included in the report. And it would seem the reason why that's not revealed in what we've had announced this week is the government hasn't even finished its own analysis of a pilot, which is due to land in July.

3:57So that might lead us to the point that this has been communicated slightly sooner than the government had originally planned. So confused, perhaps, as to the detail of specifically what parts of the internet will be affected. But I assume not very confused when it comes to the overarching purpose. I mean, it's online safety. We know that kids are not necessarily entirely protected, entirely safe when they're online. No, that's correct. That's correct. It's all about online safety. The impetus is very much on the tech companies. The government seems to be saying how this is going to be regulated and how this is going to be enforced is down to Ofcom.

4:33We already know that when it comes to the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has levied something like£5.5 million worth of fines against tech companies and have currently got£55 ,000 back into the bank. So those fines have been levied and they've not been able to actually get them. To the extent that one organisation called 4chan, an internet community message board, sent an AI-generated photograph of a hamster, giant hamster marauding over London and sent that as their legal response to the regulator. So many, many questions come from yesterday's announcement as to how this is going to be enforced and whether this is performative politics or real change is going to happen.

5:15I've got an even more fundamental question for you, Will. How do you make sure that under-16s don't get onto these aspects of the internet? Well, it's a really good question. And the government, until this point, has continually referred to what's happened in Australia and is even referring to its own plans here as Australia Plus. But when you start asking them about enforcement and how they're going to do this, because it's been an abject failure in Australia, regardless of whether you say there are elements of success in the overall plan, because 70 % of Australian under 16s who were on social media before the ban say they're still on afterwards.

5:51Seven in 10 are still on it. That's from the e-commissioner's own research now in Australia. So the challenge you face is the technical responses to this are quite blunt and are quite limited. And little did I know foolishly when I on air yesterday showed a one second click of how quickly I could change my location from London to Los Angeles on my phone and therefore circumventing the gaps, I would be retweeted by everybody from the Reform Party to government ministers. It's been viewed over a million times in 24 hours. And there are many challenges to this. And the government keeps saying there are many challenges to it, but they're denying the fact it is so simple to break what's currently in place.

6:36So unless they do something different in the UK compared to what was used in Australia, this is really just performance politics. Because I spoke to a journalist in Australia yesterday who told me in the newsroom to verify an under-16s account falsely to keep getting access to services on Australia. They used a press photograph of Michael Jackson from 1983 and they were able to get through what was classed as top-grade Australian encryption and protection to give age verification. So if we're using those services in the UK, this is not going to work in any way, shape or form. So let's hope the government comes out with something new in July that I don't know about at the moment.

7:14But I do wonder whether we're missing perhaps a bigger question here. And it's pretty straightforward. If we are banning under-16s from social media in the way in which you have described, does that mean that the rest of us have to prove that we're over 16 now? That was my overwhelming thought yesterday, in that it would appear that with pretty much everything, we are going to have to opt in to prove we are of age and over the age of 16 or 18. Do you think everyone knows this? Do you think anyone recognises this well? I don't think it's been properly spelt out by the government because they're saying that young people are going to have, and they still haven't confirmed this, but restricted access to chat GPT and other chatbots because they say they want kids to use chatbots, but they don't want them getting into age inappropriate circumstances and conversations with those chatbots.

8:00So in order to do that, we're all going to have to age verify ourselves to prove that I can have that spicy chat with chat GPT or grok or whatever takes my fancy that week. so we're in a situation where pretty much everything is going to find ourselves in that situation and off the record yesterday in a conversation with somebody it was even suggested to me and I'm not I'm not going to say who this came from but it was suggested to me that even VPNs might get age verification because that might be a way of stopping young people using VPNs but the biggest issue here is age verification is accurate to an extent where it's bad is between the ages of 14 and 18 it's because of facial features and all of those things it does not work as reliably and even the companies selling it to businesses like Microsoft, Sony, all kinds of companies use services for age verification.

8:48They say the one poor spot in our whole visibility at the moment is that young audience, exactly the types of people that we're meant to be protecting here. Hold on just for a second Will, are you saying that we are about to enter at some point next year a world where everyone who wants to access large chunks of the internet from the United Kingdom will either have to find a workaround or will have to identify themselves to someone somewhere. We are all going to be forced into uploading some form of identification, some form of proof of who we are before we can speak to Grok, go on YouTube or whatever.

9:29That's quite a fundamental change to the internet. Well, if the government is not doing that, they haven't told us what they are going to do. Because at the moment, there seems to be an awful lot of proof that you're of age to use these services. They're not saying how they're going to do that. But they keep coming back to that's for the tech companies to fix, or the regulator to legislate against. So you find yourself in a situation where you don't have the answers, but you have to start filling in some of the blanks. Because I'm not convinced I'm going to get all the answers to the questions I've posed, like I'm being promised by representatives of the government.

10:06So it's right that you would automatically go into an idea of that happening. But one of the bigger issues for me is as somebody that genuinely believes that we do need to protect young people online, I do a lot of work in child safety, and I would suggest that more does need to be done here. And the idea of this becoming a big ID play is something that damages and harms the validity of what the government are attempting to do. And whenever a prime minister or a leading member of the cabinet stands up and says, we'll be tough on tech companies, what is the ultimate sanction? Because I don't genuinely believe you can switch off most services in the UK now.

10:48And when you've got a trillionaire at the helm of one of these companies involved in this, who does not give a monkey's and has just launched his own satellite system to broadcast internet around the world, he's not going to play with the regulator. if at some point he's told he has to. So I don't know what the ultimate sanction is. And the government keeps saying there is an ultimate sanction, but they've never proved they're going to use it because nobody's paying the fines that the regulator is levying so far for Online Safety Act failures. Doesn't that just suggest that there isn't a solution to this, Will?

11:17That actually there isn't a way around this. You can either have an internet in which you remain anonymous and children get abused, or you can have children not getting abused and everyone has to identify who they are. That's true. You can mitigate risk, but you can't have the two things because the anonymous internet will always get abused by somebody and it pains me to say that but that is the reality of where we find ourselves and you also wonder just what the big tech companies are actually going to do about it do the tech companies then really take this whole idea of protection and looking after young people seriously or is it still not the top of their agenda and how do you get it to the top of their agenda to start dealing with this?

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12:39If you introduce restrictions, for example, like an internet curfew, an end to doom scrolling for under-16s, it would be quite easy then, given that you have the framework in place to do that for kids, people under the age of 16, to do that for everyone. I mean, there could be a creep in what the government wants these companies to do. And rather than it just a blank to my son, for example, it could apply to all of us. But that's the worry and the challenge. There's an awful lot of potential creep in all of this, which is why I understand those who may be more conspiratorially led than me or convinced that everything is a plan of the deep state have some skin in the game here.

13:22because there is the risk of the potential that these things could be turned or used against us, that the government could suddenly say that despite advising their own people to use them to protect data, that a virtual private network suddenly becomes something deemed as suspicious or dodgy activity by people, despite millions of us using them for genuine purposes, not just circumventing TV rights to get the World Cup or whatever from a different country, but using them for genuine purposes and for work or protection. so you do find yourself in a place where the government doesn't really know how to communicate about technology i don't think it fully understands technology and then it leads us to all be more confused about what's in and what's out because if you look at the coverage from the last 24 hours there is still people not sure whether blue sky is in or out for example what the ban looks like on youtube and some other general questions which should be really clear and simple and should have been fully communicated.

14:20I don't want to be hyperbolic, but as a result of genuine concerns for the safety of young people when they are online, isn't it the case that everything that we've been discussing makes it pretty clear that the internet, at least for those of us who use it in the United Kingdom, is going to be a very, very different place. Accessing the internet, enjoying the internet, being active online is going to be entirely different as a result of of what are ostensibly child protection measures. Yeah, I think that's right. But as somebody that has seen the first-hand impact on young people, that's not a great skin off of my nose if I have to do an annual verification or once or twice, you know, in order to prove who I am.

15:01I'm actually fine with that if stuff genuinely happens to improve the lot of those who find their lives, you know, turned upside down and properly messed up by the internet and technology. I guess the bigger issue here is, right, the tech companies have had an opportunity to be good citizens and helpful and supportive for years. This has been the mood music and the noise for ages. And they've not really stepped into the responsibility of doing it. But it's strange, right, because the Internet's 30, 35 years old, maybe slightly more, depending on who you are and how you've been using it. But none of this was ever planned in its growth and its development.

15:39It was created as a almost like a place for academics to share information. And it grew from there. And there's not really been any kind of responsible legislation or control. Likewise, the smartphone we've got in our pockets, right, 75 ,000 times more powerful than the computers that took humans to the moon. None of us really know how to use it or how to harness it or how to get the most from it. The fact that I still get bothered by people every day on a train, on speakerphone, having a two-way conversation at six in the morning, just shows you that as a society, we don't get how this stuff works.

16:12And that applies to kids as well as adults. Well, of course, it is the under-16s that have been most exercised by what Keir Starmer said. I have a letter in my hand from a very smart young man, age of 10, addressed to the Prime Minister in which he bangs on about how it's going to restrict his education and his ability to communicate. But he does have, just towards the end of this letter, and it's in the post to Downing Street already, he says, I have a solution for these would-be issues while keeping the social media ban. You and the government create a website where people can post videos and shorts, but everything posted gets checked.

16:48The rules, no bad language seen by younger accounts, no violence. A suggestion is to make verifying accounts very strict, including scans and hard questions. That way, children can watch things while being safe. I mean, I'm just wondering if this 10-year-old might have hit the nail on the head here. If the social media companies had pulled their finger out in the first place and made sure that by themselves that young people were unable to see this sort of content, there would be no need for a ban in the first place. Isn't that right? I think the 10-year-old has actually nailed it on so many levels.

17:25I think a controlled place which children are safe in and is not obsessed potentially with advertising or getting the personal data of those kids, but it's a place they can share ideas, shouldn't just be a utopian ideal. It should be something that an organisation somewhere looks to create and develop. So I reckon that 10-year-old might be the prime minister in the future and I might be talking about their reactions to technology in the next 30 or 40 years. But isn't he basically just pointing out the fact that these tech companies have a business model that can only thrive without their being?

18:00The checks and guarantees in place that mean that he would be unable to access, completely unable to access, the sort of material that I, as someone over the age of 16, should be entitled to. Yeah, and I think that is very much the challenge. At the moment, we don't have a two-tier internet. We don't have a kid's internet and an adult's internet. And maybe that is the inherent design flaw that is faced here, that the kind of content that we would be discussing or the views we would be expunging as adults, kids are equally exposed to that at the moment. And I don't necessarily know how you go about doing that unless we switch the internet off for a year or so and try and reinvent it.

18:39This is the challenge. The internet came and we all got on it and we all started using it. and it was a relatively long time 10 15 20 years before we started realizing the harms of the internet and the harms of social media and I wonder how you go back and do it because one of the things that stuck with me in the last 24 hours and I hadn't really considered it before was this ban is all about the the people like that young lad who messaged in and my daughter who's eight this is all about protecting them if they haven't got onto social platforms and started using them this isn't about the 14 and a half year old who's really screaming against their parents because they've lost access to a service they love because you're never going to properly get the genie back in the bottle but what you might be able to do is start having some more sophisticated conversations with that younger generation to see what happens and we don't know how that's going to be impacted yet we haven't seen any of the results or data from that in Australia because it's a generational thing it's going to take a couple of years before we can truly see what happens but what's most important for me is I hope this doesn't become a political football I don't want the next government to go, ah, we're ripping it out.

19:42The UK needs freedom of speech, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is admirable that somebody is attempting to protect young people and trying to do it. Whether or not we agree it's the right or the wrong solution, that's a conversation for another day. Sure, but am I wrong to feel that we are fundamentally losing something about the internet that was one of its fundamental tenets? You know, the idea that you could be whoever you wanted to be online, that you could be no one online, that there was this full range of information out there for you to access. I get that the internet of 1996 and 2026 are vastly different things, but it just feels like it's not going to be the same place that it used to be.

20:23I agree with you that we're losing something, but maybe we might gain something else, which is a little bit more time for young people to emotionally develop and set some boundaries. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, But we're going into a hell of a rocky period if, you know, a group of, let's say, even, you know, optimistically, 11 to 16 year olds are going to find themselves in a situation where they're not going to have access to something they've spent most of their time on. I don't want kids to suddenly find themselves without the Internet and nobody guiding parents or helping people to take kids through these hard conversations.

21:00That's an important role that people need, the government needs to play too. But genuinely, do you think 10 years from now, people will be looking back on this moment, looking at this set of proposals and will see them as child protection, as entirely about child protection? Or was this the point at which everyone lost their anonymity on the internet? I'm far more concerned about artificial intelligence and the harms of that on society but I think in 10 years time actually no I can't even imagine what the internet is going to look like in 10 years time but what I do hope is that maybe we can keep a bit of that childlike innocence for some people for a little bit longer and if that happens actually as far as I'm concerned that's a win but whether or not that win is worth the pain that the rest of us have to go through in verification and identification a lot of the time yet to be seen Well, thanks again And that's a lot for today We will of course update you as to any response from Downing Street to the grumpy child And if there's anything in today's podcast that's got you worked up Remember, you can always get in touch, why at sky.uk In fact, plenty of you did after yesterday's episode on Donald Trump's Iran ceasefire agreement Gary says, what if anything are countries and companies doing So as not to be dependent on using the Strait of Hormuz in the future now that it's clear that Iran can close it whenever it wants.

22:19Well, Gary, we will pick up on that next time we cover Iran. And if you haven't listened to the episode, just scroll back in your podcast app or find a playlist on YouTube. This is why it's back tomorrow.

22:36As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening with Here's the Scoop, a new podcast from NBC News with me, your host, Yasmin Asugyan. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News' trusted journalists. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and it's informative, bringing you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world. From the front page to the zeitgeist, here's The Scoop from NBC News. Listen daily wherever you get your podcasts.