New blogpost: "A proposed legislative amendment to attempt to ban under 16s in the UK from common messaging services, sharing family photos, using Wikipedia, and doing much else online, by imposing age assurance on everyone"
I'd have my head in my hands, if that didn't make typing rather tricky.
Read and despair (and don't forget to like and subscribe), fellow Internet people.
@neil It's astonishing that they didn't try to bundle this with the new ID card nonsense - at least that way they could sell the ID card as "a way to prove your age securely and privately". Instead, we're getting two unwanted & unjustified bits of nonsense with, as you so rightly say, no clear problem statement.
@neil Welp! It's getting quite hard to distinguish between the religious extremists, industry lobbyists and Russian agents...
Starmer for all his flaws almost certainly will oppose this Amendment. Actually banning people from "social media" (which really means the internet under this Amendment) is where he's drawn the line.
We will then have to hope it doesn't turn into a "ping pong" where Lords will insist on the Amendment in order to pass the education bill at all.
Nobody in Lords (including the handful of Lords members who spoke against the Amendment) seemed to realize how incredibly broad the Amendment was when it was originally debated in June. (The Amendment was subsequently withdrawn, but has now been brought back to life.)
@neil
Moving war on the underage surely bodes well for the future, dear, old men and dull women playing politician. But sure, they'll be so "safe" this way.
@neil lil typo, 'subscriber' unless deliberate and I don't get it 😁
@neil This is either blinding incompetence or deeply sinister, most likely the first. Your point that this amendment does not try to state what problem it is trying to solve is probably the most damning thing about it. Utterly clueless. You are right to be grumpy.
@neil there’s an interview on privacy guides about the same sort of thing in the U.S. https://www.privacyguides.org/videos/2025/12/16/taylor-lorenz-on-kosa-the-screen-act-and-repealing-section-230/ The interview mentions many potential negative consequences of anything like this. The fact that so many western nations are pushing this sort of thing at the same time shows there must be some level of communication and/or coordination, so we should all probably also pay attention to what’s going on with this sort of thing in other nations.
@neil Another instalment in a long running series of "1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a handbook"
@neil This is outrageous. Totally disproportionate. Why not have equally strict requirements to ensure road safety for example? How are young people supposed to learn to use online spaces? What about parents & children who are separated by work or by our draconian immigration requirements? Why will young people suddenly emerge at 16 as fully discriminating online citizens? Duh. So many reasons why this is a terrible idea.
@neil this is absolutely ludicrous, thank you for writing about it.
@neil what about homework set by schools and done online? So many schools work like this now. and since you have to log in to the service to use it, i assume it falls into scope…
@neil
"If there was a clear problem statement, that would be a start."
See that's why you're not a politician, this is way too sensible a suggestion.
@neil I have no words for this. Truly breathtaking stupidity with a side order or blatant malice.
How can anyone look at the mess of the current act and thing "oh yeah this is good but we need more of it"?
It sounds like the problems so far have been features rather than bugs and the aim really is for it to be the Online Stazi Act.
@neil of course the real objective is to make *everybody* register to be able to use the Internet. So from being a public good it moves to being controlled by the government who can give or withdraw your permission to use it.
They describe it as restricting the under 16s when actually it restricts all of us because they assume we are under 16 unless we can prove otherwise.
@neil lol, "say you don't actually have kids with out saying you don't have kids" In legislative form
User to user service sounds like it would cover Google classroom. Which my son has had to use since the pandemic.
@neil Ffs so the startup I work for which helps companies collect feedback from users would probably be captured in this because we offer things like user surveys.
That's the kind of thing that could just kill us. There's literally four of us, we have zero business reason to do identity checks, and we're still trying to find product market fit.
Wonderful. Truely wonderful.
@neil Stuff like this makes me wonder if legislators were always this…I don’t know. Stupid? Out of their depth? Mendacious? Or, is this a new phenomenon?
@neil who could possibly have guessed that the Online Safety wedge would have a thin end?
@neil Over here in Germany a member of parliament just demanded that we work towards making sure that there are no devices in Europe "being capable of displaying or processing child pornographic material"
https://chaos.social/@andre_meister/115739903246681037 🤦♂️
It seems we're back in the part of the cycle where these people crawl out from under their rocks and have to be beaten back.
"Vigilance, Mr. Worf, that is the price we have to continually pay."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbQvCzWkATA
@neil Would that then potentially ban Wikipedia for all school children (up to A levels at least)?
@neil in an odd way, I'd kinda like to see this happen because it would set a precedent for people flagrantly violating these rules. It's time to stop taking them seriously. That goes for site operators and users. Ofcom has a fairly limited budget and it would be easily overwhelmed by embroiling it in a quagmire of protracted legal battles. Especially if those involved the ECHR.
@neil just another thing that will make legal activity much harder than illegal workarounds
@neil 😭😭😭 this is so regressive. And silly. And unworkable.
Are they really trying to go back to a time where kids couldn't socialise any way but in person? I understand concerns about bullying, but for me, the advent of the WWW helped me make friends *away* from bullies.
I know I'm not saying anything original, it just feels like some people in power have a very rose-tinted view of what amounts to social isolation.
@neil seems appropriate, in the week where pornhub has apparently been hacked...
