The kids (with phones) are alright – Hi, I'm Heather Burns

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There was a remarkable video going around the Scottish socials yesterday which led to quite a bit of media coverage. It’s a four-minute long video showing some furious Scotrail passengers confronting a drunk middle-aged pervert who is quietly filming a group of quiet, sober 16- and 17-year old girls heading home from a night out.

It really is worth a watch, because it’s a four-minute long documentary masterclass in bystander action, documenting offenses, holding perpetrators to account, centering the victims, and somehow staying calm and focused even when you want to batter the fuck out of someone who has it coming.

(Disclaimer: the spoken dialogue in the video is not in the King’s English, it’s in our local Glaswegian dialect, which…some of you seem to struggle with. As you’re also aware by now, in our dialect, we use obscenities like other people use punctuation. Just so you know.)

https://heatherburns.tech/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/ssstwitter.com_1783405302508.mp4

Of course the pervert turns out to be a senior legal officer at Edinburgh City Council. Of course he was. Hold on to that thought, it matters.

Right then Heather, what on earth does a video of an alkie on a train have to do with tech policy?

A lot, as it turns out.

The first point is that the passengers instinctively confront and document the person inflicting the harm. At no time do they castigate the teenage girls being filmed without their knowledge or consent – young women who are absolutely entitled to any night out they please – or imply that it’s the girls’ conduct at fault. The whole train has the girls’ backs.

This runs against the grain of 2026 tech policy, which decrees that it’s young people who need their behavior censored and constrained, in ways that punish them for the actions of the perpetrator.

The second point is that as far as policymakers are concerned, it’s the senior legal officer with the phone who is rightfully entitled to have the phone and use it any way he pleases. If the girls on a night out are allowed to have a phone at all – and there are areas of British society which do not believe they should – then their usage of them must be strictly controlled, censored, and curtailed, allegedly for their own protection.

Those policy arguments are shielded in the need to take back control from Big Tech. But what happened on that train, as you saw, had nothing to do with Big Tech, aside from the video of the incident being shared there. That incident was about the dynamics of power, privilege, and dominance, as they play out every day in the real world.

And it’s about time we talked about that.

I have written before about how the raft of legislation aiming to control what young adults can do with their phones, essentially punishing them for the sins of Big Tech, can put their immediate personal safety at risk from dangers far more violent than algorithms.

Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday. Those girls on the train clearly have been allowed to develop some excellent adulting and resilience skills.

Not all young people are that lucky, by design and – as things currently stand – by policy aspiration.

We don’t talk enough about how the impetus for the most authoritarian internet regulation in the UK, including the In other words, the cultural values that a detached elite wish to impose on their offspring for life have been transposed into law, policy, and regulation, and from there, into the personal lives of young people who are living in very different cultural circumstances, in very different places, with very different mental maps of how their lives are going to play out.

We are allowing cosseted snobs for whom "if you called your dad, he could stop it all" is the only truth they have ever known in their lives, and ever will, decree how some teenagers on a train hundreds of miles away should be able to react when they are being targeted by a predator in a small, confined space.

That’s why this video matters.

What you are seeing in this video is an inflection point. It’s watching policy arguments crumble on their first contact with the real world. It’s watching how power works on paper, vs how power works in the real world, and how that balance can invert itself in a second. It’s watching lines of carefully constructed public relations dogma being thrown on their heads. It’s watching working-class teenagers who have far better heads on their shoulders than the elite pervert filming them in public. It’s watching how personal security plays out for women, in real time, in the real...