The UK Censors The Net 'For The Children'
Authored by Ted Newson via AmericanThinker.com,
Outgoing British prime ministers have a tendency to rapidly expand the remit of the state in their final days.
Theresa May tied a Net Zero target into law, Rishi Sunak implemented a generational smoking ban.
Keir Starmer is no exception.
The British state has now outlawed social media usage for those under sixteen.
On June 15, Starmer stood at Downing Street to announce that Britain would ban under-16s from social media, after intense pressure from campaigners. Possibly his last meaningful political action before resigning on June 22. Additionally, the now-departed PM has left the door open to curfews for 16 and 17-year-olds. The country that gave the world the liberal philosophy America's Founders drew on is now imposing digital ID and information bans.
The justification is public safety. A framing that has a habit of expanding well beyond its original scope. Banning under-16s from social media is framed as "giving children back their childhoods"; in reality, it has a much darker undertone.
Not all social media is created equal. Depending on how they’re put to use, these platforms can serve as invaluable educational resources. Excessive social media use, as a substitute for going outside, is the real issue that studies show.
As state education systems become increasingly politicized, social media can give curious minds access to alternative perspectives that will help them make sense of the world for themselves. While recently social media algorithms have pushed people into more radical politics, the solution is to change the algorithm, not the user.
My teen years were shaped by non-mainstream thinkers from across the political spectrum. At that time, the UK had a centrist government and a narrow Overton window. In the classroom, there were ‘politically correct’ and ‘politically incorrect’ opinions. To explore views the British commentariat either ignored or scorned, I looked to YouTube. The Oxford and Cambridge debates I found there at fifteen took every viewpoint as worthy of criticism, debate, and rebuttal.
As someone who now works in politics, having the ability to watch ‘adult’ debates from a young age expanded my mind and helped me in learning some key skills for the future. This kind of intellectual curiosity is exactly what under-16s should be showing. A blanket ban on usage will only stunt the growth of the next generation.
The philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that the state may only restrict liberty to prevent harm to others, not to protect people from themselves. A teenager on Instagram harms no one but possibly themselves. That, by the oldest principle in liberal democracy, is their business and their parents', not Starmer's.
An aggressive form of state parenting would at least be understandable (though still unfair) if applied across every facet of young people’s lives. At sixteen you can join the army, have a child, and under Labour's own proposals, vote; but apparently you cannot be trusted with Instagram.
The ban doesn’t make sense for teens, but they’re not the only ones who will be affected. Enforcing the ban will require a system for online age verification. Think digital ID checks for the entire population. The House of Lords has even voted to force VPN providers to implement digital ID to close the workaround.
What could possibly go wrong? Data breaches leading to all manner of harm, that’s what.
This level of paternalism isn’t just in British politics. Despite the various flaws exposed by an Australian social media ban, Spain, Greece, and Slovenia are working on bans of their own. France is also expected to implement an under-15s ban. America must resist the pressure of the bipartisan “child safety” coalition in Congress and resist any expansion of KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act). Not only does age-gating the internet push children onto unmoderated dark-web-adjacent sites, it opens up the rest of the population to providing vast amounts of their personal data to social media companies to appease the government.
What Starmer called putting "power back in parents' hands" actually means handing your passport details to a social media company and handing permanent regulatory power to the Secretary of State; with no sunset clause, no parliamentary override, and no expiry date. It is no longer the case that parents get to decide their own social media policy for their children, the government must go above parents in deciding what is best for children. Ultimately, this leads to people having less individual agency when deciding things. The state, apparently, knows better.
Parents should be allowed to decide what their children see. If they want to use YouTube as an educational tool for their kids, they should be allowed to do so at any age. As things stand, a child aged fifteen would be able to watch Baby Shark videos on YouTube Kids, but be barred from accessing a college lecture.
America was built on freedom and individual rights. It is for that reason, it is one of the most prosperous countries in the world. U.S. lawmakers should resist the urge to follow the rest of the world into overregulation, paternalism, and mass surveillance. Britain is discovering what happens when the state appoints itself the parent of a nation. America was founded precisely to prevent that.
Tyler Durden Wed, 07/22/2026 - 02:00