Mastodawn

The UK's New Under-16 Social Media Ban Will Cause More Harm Than It Prevents

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/uks-new-under-16-social-media-ban-will-cause-more-harm-it-prevents

#HackerNews #UKSocialMedia #Ban #Harmful #Impact #YouthSafety #DigitalRights #SocialMediaPolicy

The UK’s New Under-16 Social Media Ban Will Cause More Harm Than It Prevents

This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027. The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Sam 3d ago

☀️ Morning everyone,
With the news on the UK's "Phase 2" of the Online Safety Act rolling out, my focus has shifted heavily. Today's tasks are all about digital resilience and decentralization:

👉 Boosting Alternative Networks: I have to push Solent.Social and the broader Fediverse much harder.

👉 Learn New Systems: Exploring alternative platforms, as the upcoming round of strict ID verification rules will likely lock out or restrict access to mainstream spaces like TikTok and YouTube (So maybe looking at PeerTube and Loops).

👉 Content Redundancy: Pushing further into content creation while simultaneously building digital backups on alternative, self-hosted or federated systems like PeerTube or just uploading it directly to Solent.Social

👉 Alternative Comms: Researching Discord alternatives (hoping Fluxer has finally got its decentralized architecture live).

There is an immense amount of work to do before these highly invasive "safety" systems are fully implemented.

At this stage, bringing friends and family over to safer, independent digital spaces isn't just a preference, It’s a necessity! No one should be subject to this level of blanket surveillance. It treats people as criminals right out the gate and company greed causes them to harvest our personal data even further to train AI Models to replace us. This is all getting ridiculous.

#OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #UKSocialMedia #SocialMediaBan #SocialMediaBanUK #IDVerification #UK #Discord #OnlineSafetyActUK #Surveillance #IDVerify

Sam 4d ago

Apart of the UK's new Ban on Social Media it's going to affect multiple places including YouTube.

This means UK YouTubers will most likely have to provide ID earlier than before along with anyone watching from the UK to watch content this could be the whole platform or for select content like Gaming Content, Skits and basic content with minor swearing.

There's so much uncertain with the new changes they want to make to the internet and they seem to keep on moving the goal posts. Apart of this new system they are looking to add a curfew for the internet making anyone that does provide ID to get past a certain time on the internet.... ummm I pay for my internet that should be enough.

#UKSocialMedia #SocialMediaBan #SocialMediaBanUK #IDVerification #UK

Sam 4d ago

@dansup I'm curious, With the UK's new Ban on Social Media for under 16s forcing users to most likely to have to ID verify for Instagram and other central socials (including YouTube and TikTok).

How do you think this would effect the Fediverse a whole, PixelFed, Loops and more.

(Also believe Canada is looking into a similar ban)

#UKSocialMedia #SocialMediaBan #SocialMediaBanUK #IDVerification

Sam 5d ago

Tuned in late but it seems like Keir Starmer is banning under 16s from Social Media, making a bigger push for ID Verification of these sorts of platforms and I'm really going to have to get solent.social for my local area out there as this sucks for everyone.

ID Verification through the past year has been shown it doesn't work, causes more and more issues with data leaks and children finding bypasses. This government is a joke making it actually more dangerous for adults and children.

#IDVerification #UK #UKSocialMedia #SocialMediaBan #SocialMediaBanUK