Why do people want teens on social media??

An under 16 can’t buy an energy drink or go to the cinema to see an 18 rated horror film either, what’s your point?
I’m sure you didn’t take great issue with either of those last week.

They’ll have the nicely packaged newsround at school.

Starmer's vision is "someday we can dream of a society where all information can be regulated".

Banning YouTube for kids is nuts. There's amazing stuff on there, and safe supervised.

16yr old shouldn't vote either, how would they know anything especially without access to SM?

Is that definitely known?

I have many discussions with parents who want me to read the riot act to the child who told theirs to fuck off, but won't remove Snapchat from their child's phone, or block them from being added to GCs. If parents can not parent, someone needs to help them do that.

This sounds to me, though, like it's the innocent person being blamed for having access to a facility that others seek to abuse. If scammers phone me, am I to blame for their actions for having a phone on which they can contact me in the first place? Even going old-school, if I receive a poison pen letter in the post, is it my fault for having a letterbox?

I do take the point if they're all demonstrably at it and giving as good (or bad) as they get. In that case, they should indeed lose a privilege if they have proven that they can't be trusted with it; but it's grossly unfair for innocent people to lose it too. If somebody is given an ASBO and ordered to wear an ankle tag, we don't just do the same to everybody of the same age/sex/race in their neighbourhood.

Phones and social media aren't going to go away, so maybe we desperately need a generation or two whereby young people growing up with them need to be specifically taught about proper, respectful use of them and what is and isn't acceptable. Surely it's the perfect opportunity to do this whilst they're still being educated and subject to parents and teachers, rather than just sweeping it under the carpet until they're 16 or 18 and then leaving the fallout for society in general to deal with, once they no longer have those protections.

Children aren't allowed to take out mortgages or loans, or commit to most other financial products and services... but we still teach them about money management in schools, in anticipation of when they soon will be adults in the big wide world. If we let them wait until they're 18 before teaching them about it, and then they're suddenly predated on by banks ands loan companies without that background knowledge empowering them to make wise decisions, we've kind of missed the boat quite spectacularly. If we believe that we can rely on people to suddenly know everything that they need to know in their lives once they reach 18, what's the point of school anyway?

I personally agree with a ban and think it should have happened a lot earlier. Parents don't want to parent and too many of them are a bit thick. As long as the kids are out of their hair, they don't care.

There's only a bit outcry because it's Keir starmer. He will never win no matter what he does.

You can get married and vote in Scotland age 16 but you can’t watch Youtube and facebook until then? It is mad. 14 would have been a more sensible age.

Saying parents need to parent their kids is like saying dog owners should not leave dog shit on the pavement.

Yes many dog owners do clean up their dog shit, but plenty don't and there's always someone affected who will step in this/wheel their pushchair through it.

It's all fine and dandy saying what parents should do, but they don't... and the rest of us suffer.

And what are they going to hack exactly? These systems are de-centralised, there isn’t a big pot of data.

I think OP that people can't think of it as anything other than the government getting into banning certain tv shows.

I think most people have a vague idea that too much is bad for kids. When the reality is it's like letting them drink gin on their cereal and carry it around in water bottle all day.

Researchers are already aware but as more of that research on brain development becomes available to the public, it is going to be as unthinkable to allow it as it would be to give kids cigarettes.

I don't think hackers from foreign countries are particularly regulated.

You can get a Lebara sim for £5 a month.

My 13 yo has this. When she was in y6, this is what I gave her- old phone with Lebara sim. I told her she was not allowed to give her number out and only gave permission for this at the end of y6.

Just an option you may want to consider.

Some of the worst bullying seems to happen via group chats. Some say that isn't social media. My feeling is that people 'speak' differently in texts and messages, nuance is missed or missing. Whilst it's true a bad bully will always find a way to be unkind, there are plenty of petty spats dodged by avoiding engaging too much with group chats.

Age based bans put off the inevitable. DS is in his 20s and at uni. A ridiculous toxic situation arose in a recent group chat. Most on the chat just left and alternative one was set up. It's possible to speculate that the swiftness with which this happened was down to years of experience. Perhaps too many years.

"It's good for them to socialise" because it gets them out of the parents hair- similar arguments were put up back in the day about TV- it was somewhere you could park your kids and get on with something else, but many people thought it should be banned or restricted.

Good news, as has been stated throughout this thread, you won’t need to!!

Generally speaking when biometric data is used for age verification it is not stored long term, it verifies the age, is stored for 30 days to allow for any challenge required, and is then deleted. It is not used for anything else, it would not be lawful. It is not used for training purposes. The government already does this with One Login, and as already stated this is already happening in the online gaming
sector.

The use of biometric data is heavily regulated.

Can you explain how that would be rolled out?

Fantastic post!

I won't be providing an ID to any pedophile like Elon Musk or weirdo like Zuckerberg. I use social media with a anonymous name like here, so it would not bother me at all.

They've named far more than 'a couple'. OK, fair enough if they are going to capture every single SM site that exists in the legislation, and also pre-ban any future new platforms which currently don't exist but which could have a SM element to them.

It is a dog's dinner how they've announced it so far: talking about 'banning' YouTube for under 16s, then there's a suggestion that it won't include YouTube Kids (and nobody has ever deliberately misrepresented inappropriate content as suitable for kids for financial or other gains); then we hear that, in Australia - the model for all of this - they can watch as much YT as they like (except for videos specifically flagged as adults only), but just won't be able to sign in to upload their own content or leave comments.

It would have been much, much better if they had properly decided what they were going to do and then announced it as a complete plan, rather than piecemeal and erratically. Ironically, that would also have taken far less of a needless toll on the mental and emotional health of millions of young people if they'd cared about and respected them enough to clearly lay out the plan without all of the unanswered questions and endless uncertainty.

Facial recognition. Biometric data. Are you comfortable with them knowing this about your kids? AI will only get more powerful in future. Once you give personal data, you can't take it back, not easily.

@Delatronyes but because I actually parent my child, these issues were picked up on straight away and dealt with swiftly. I’m not the type of parent to just let my child get away with things. Actions have consequences and she was swiftly delivered to the doorstep of the child who was taking the brunt of the group chat - something which none of the other parents in the group did. And you know what, she never did it again. But equally, all of what she did could have been done on whatsap, and that isn’t being banned, so I don’t understand how issues like these will stop. Parents need to parent their children, it really is as simple as that. And take swift accountability when things go wrong.

Completely agree. And I despair at this thread.

Not sure how likely this is, has anything been said on that

If it’s just the private app putting in age restrictions and no link to the gov then that’s better.

Nobody is comparing it to smoking. But it is harmful- proven so- for young children. Why would the death of even just one child caused by online behaviour (it’s more often blackmail involving nude images) not concern you? Did we wait until X figure before introducing smoking bans, or age restrictions on purchasing alcohol, etc. Do you want higher numbers of children losing their lives before you’ll worry about it and consider what we can do as a society to help?