Starmer, the Under-16s Are Smarter Than You — fireborn

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Starmer, the Under-16s Are Smarter Than You

Published on June 15, 2026

Today, Keir Starmer stood at a podium in Downing Street and announced that the UK will ban social media for anyone under 16. TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, X, and Facebook — gone for minors, though not YouTube Kids, WhatsApp, or Signal. Regulations could land as early as spring 2027. He called it "a full ban" and said it was "the right choice." He said the UK was going "further than any country in the world," as though that were a point of pride rather than a warning sign.

He also said we need to "resist learned helplessness" about what big tech companies claim is possible. This from the man who personally absented himself from the Commons vote on this exact measure in March — when the government defeated a backbench amendment to do precisely what he's now announcing. One hundred and seven Labour MPs also missed that vote. Funny how the helplessness evaporates once the political pressure gets uncomfortable enough.

The Online Safety Act Was Supposed to Fix This

The Online Safety Act took eight years to pass. Eight years, multiple ministers, three prime ministers, and an extraordinary number of near-collapses over contested provisions — including a clause that would have required platforms to scan encrypted private messages for illegal content, which critics including former National Cyber Security Centre head Ciaran Martin warned would break end-to-end encryption and build surveillance infrastructure the government didn't even have the technology to use yet.

The "legal but harmful" content provisions — powers that would have required platforms to remove content that wasn't illegal but that Ofcom deemed harmful — were eventually stripped out after critics across the political spectrum warned they'd amount to "the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history." David Davis, a Conservative MP, used exactly that phrase. Kemi Badenoch said the bill was in "no fit state to become law."

What remained was still substantive: platforms required to take responsibility for illegal content and content harmful to children, Ofcom as regulator, fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global turnover. The government called it world-leading legislation that would make the UK "the safest place in the world to be online."

Critics warned at the time — loudly, repeatedly, from multiple directions — that the infrastructure being built would be repurposed. That age verification requirements would expand. That the child safety framing would be used to justify ever-broader controls. The Constitution Society noted explicitly that "under the cover of protecting children," the government had already "conferred on itself future powers to access end-to-end encrypted messages."

People said this was a slippery slope. They were right. It took less than three years.

By July 2025, Ofcom began enforcing mandatory age verification checks for adult content. Within days, VPN usage in the UK surged by 6,430 percent. A petition demanding the Act be scrapped cleared 450,000 signatures. The government said it had no plans to repeal it. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle called what he'd inherited "a very uneven, unsatisfactory legislative settlement." The world-leading thing that was going to fix all of this was barely two years old. So naturally, the answer is more of the same, harder.

We Already Ran This Experiment

Australia's under-16 social media ban took effect on December 10, 2025. Fines for non-compliance could reach $49.5 million AUD. Over 4.7 million accounts were removed in the first month.

By December 11th, the Australian Prime Minister's own TikTok account had comments from people saying "I'm still here, wait until I can vote."

Fourteen-year-old Evelyn, in New South Wales, told the Washington Post she planned to use her mother's face ID to log in to Snapchat and Instagram. That's the entire security model, defeated by a teenager who knows where her mum keeps her phone.

By April 2026, surveys found most Australian teenagers acknowledged the ban wasn't working. The methods: VPNs, parents' biometrics, borrowed devices, platforms not covered by the law. Meta warned the Australian government explicitly that a blanket ban would just push kids to other apps, describing the result as a "whack-a-mole effect" — teenagers use over 40 apps a week, and most aren't covered.

Starmer's government sent ministers to Australia to study the ban before making today's announcement. They went, they looked, they came home and announced it anyway.

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