When the history of the first quarter of the 21st century comes to be written, it will record a period when we took the greatest communications medium in the history of humanity – the internet – and turned it into an invasive, toxic, mass surveillance machine, beyond even George Orwell’s imagination.
For generations, the four horsemen of the infocalypse – terrorists, drug dealers, child abusers and organised crime – have been the staple justifications of choice for a smorgasbord of laws intended to tackle these evils. The Labour government between 1997 and 2010 introduced more than forty major serious crime and counter-terrorism laws.
During the same period, unfettered, private sector mass surveillance & profiling, of a scale unthinkable before the turn of the century, plus addictive, attention- grabbing apps and social media algorithms, became established as the core business model of the internet.
The most profitable firms in the world either monetise or otherwise exploit data through stalker advertising and profiling and/or provide software and hardware services and infrastructure to the economic & state actors who do.
The technology systems built and rolled out by those companies are used, extensively, by states which, like commerce, have a voracious appetite for personal data, in the whole gamut of government services from law enforcement, health and social welfare to border control, military, security and intelligence.
In the wake of the 11th September, 2001 attacks, counter terrorism became the primary excuse for western governments’ expansion of mass surveillance. By the mid-2010s, it remained a core theme for government but the terrorism mantra was wearing thin and the prominent pretext for surveillance moved to immigration and border control.
In parallel, child protection and “online safety” became high profile vehicles for a collection of demands that something must be done about the negativities of the internet and the unethical behaviour of the big technology corporations. By 2023 that led to the introduction by the UK of the Online Safety Act, a complex piece of legislation with the “general purpose of making the use of internet services… safer for individuals in the United Kingdom” through imposing a duty of care on online services providers.
One of the primary effects of the Act seems to have been a boon in the market for age verification services. And, indeed, VPN services, which the government are also now considering restricting. Section 12(4) of the Act mandates the use of age verification or age estimation to prevent children from accessing harmful content. Section 12(6) says this age verification should be “highly effective”. In short, dear reader, age verification is not marginally, let alone highly effective and declaring a mandate for highly effective technology in a statute does not, magically, bring it into existence.
Ahead of the Makerfield byelection and his likely replacement by Andy Burnham, the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, with his teen social media ban proposal, announced plans to polish a capstone on his legacy, such as it is, by forcing everyone to wade through some form of identity and/or age verification service before using the internet. The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model - seven layer model of the internet – is about to get an eighth layer in the UK, the insecure layer, if the October 2025 Discord data breach compromising 70,000 users, including their government issued ID images, is anything to go by. Mr Starmer’s insecure layer, retrofitted to a toxic mass surveillance machine, will compromise the privacy and security of every internet user, including children, whilst failing to improve child safety.
Last week the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee of Parliament, following an inquiry on the digital centre of government, published a report Rewiring the state: Delivering digital government.
The report is scathing on government information & data security (highlighting Biobank breaches), unsubstantiated hype about a claimed £45 billion per year savings from digital services, government plans for digital ID (noting operational and security problems relating to the eVisa system and One Login’s temporary loss of certification against the government’s own digital identity framework). On digital sovereignty the report expresses concerns that "The UK’s reliance on a small number of US-based providers for digital infrastructure and public service delivery is a strategic and economic vulnerability."
Most notably, in the context of the proposed teen social media ban, however, it declares government ignorance of technology, “enthusiasm from non-experts at the top” combined with “insufficient skills at the coalface” to be a “dangerous” combination. Dangerous is the word for it, particularly for those teens who rely on internet access for social, educational and mental health support, often exclusively because they cannot find that support elsewhere.
The petition to parliament not to go ahead with this ban has already, at the time of writing, passed 200,000 signatures.
A prime minister serious about child protection would firstly insist on enforcing existing regulatory measures, such as the UK GDPR articles 8 and 9, against social media companies and secondly, pursue orders of magnitude greater investment in social and sports facilities and infrastructure, children’s services, parental support, social welfare, education, health, mental health services and, where necessary, policing; with properly coordinated, local interdisciplinary teams across all these services working in tandem, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.
Also, as Cory Doctorow says, we need to protect kids from online surveillance, the precise opposite of what the UK government is proposing: “Your kids can't be targeted by algorithms without the surveillance data that's being used to target them. They can't be funneled into pro-anorexia content or extreme misogyny forums without that funnel being primed by commercial spying.”
Peddling a headline grabbing social media ban is just another ineffective but also corrosive and dangerous attempt at a quick fix to a challenging and complex sociotechnological problem. If, however, after two and a half decades of digital technology enabled mass surveillance and failed government technical quick fixes in relation to all four infocalyptic horsemen, you still believe the PM’s claim that a social media ban decimating everyone’s privacy is the solution to the complex issue children’s safety, I wonder if I could interest you in the purchase of a couple of bridges, one in London, one in Brooklyn?
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