Rayner tells Starmer: Ban social media for under-16s
Labour Digital Rights Network on X - "It is incredibly frustrating to hear Angela Rayner treat state-mandated digital exclusion as an "easy fix" and low-hanging political fruit. The implications of a blanket ban are far from simple. Enforcing these restrictions will fundamentally alter how all of us interact with the digital world, inevitably ending the right to online anonymity. On top of this, the evidence from Australia is already clear: prohibition is failing. Polling shows that over 60% of teens still have active accounts, with 70% of those users reporting it was "easy" to circumvent the rules using VPNs or entering fake birthdays. With Keir Starmer currently facing intense political pressure over the future of his leadership, we cannot risk this draconian and unworkable policy being fast-tracked simply to appease backbenchers or secure a quick political "legacy". We urge all potential Labour leadership candidates to clearly outline their positions on digital rights. We need an evidence-led approach that forces unaccountable Big Tech monopolies to fix their toxic, profit-driven algorithms, not a blind imitation of Australia’s failed experiment."
Michael Reiners on X - "The insistence that this is necessary - a claim that is not founded in any consultation - is even upsetting Labour’s own base, as in the quoted post. Rayner’s proposal would involve age gating of the entire British population on entry to much of the internet, in order to bar 16 year olds from ‘social media’ (a term not well understood by those pushing for this). Every person in Britain will be compelled to doxx themselves to simply use sites the government has deemed to fall under their definition of social media. This is a form of digital ID, framed as child safety, with no justification based in reality. The Englishman has had unfettered internet without calamity in the past - he shall be enabled do so again, and our state will be forced to drop its censorious impulses. @NoToDigitalID"
Starmer's under-16s social media ban reeks of desperation - "Britain will learn the lessons from the Australian experiment in banning social media for children, vowed Starmer. We will have to: Australian children have become quite adept at using fake IDs and various technical solutions, resulting, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, in 60 per cent of under-16s circumventing the ban. This is no discouragement for the Prime Minister: “[Children] get around other laws too, but we don’t say, ‘Oh, look, a teenager managed to get a drink somehow, so let’s not bother banning alcohol sales to children’. We don’t do that, do we?”... This ban has two major attractions for Starmer (three if you count its central, stated aim): first, it won’t cost the Government much; and secondly, it confirms Labour’s – and Labour activists’ – defining principle that everything should be either free, banned or compulsory."
Melissa Chen on X - "Bit odd that that investigating child abuse by grooming gangs was resisted for years but then now all of a sudden, child safety is the number one priority for Keir Starmer. Just watch this government build the machinery to verify every adult online at speed. And once the infrastructure exists, the uses for it will go far beyond social media age checks"
Kiyahri Selwyn on X - "It’s also odd how Starmer and his lot have screamed for years about not giving out information online and now they want your entire history stored on a hackable database."
Melissa Chen on X - "Yeap. I believe the EU is in the process of rolling out the European Digital ID Wallet. Each of the 27 Member States must offer at least one certified wallet to citizens, residents, and businesses by the end of this year. Thought the UK would be safe from digital ID because the people voted to leave but... well. Here we are"
Meme - "CHILDREN CAN CHOOSE THEIR OWN GENDER *Happy Keir Starmer*
SOCIAL MEDIA IS TOO DANGEROUS FOR CHILDREN *Unhappy Keir Starmer*"
Labour’s spyware plan for phones is straight out of North Korea - "The technological reality of Sir Keir Starmer’s demand is extraordinary: that every smartphone in Britain must be child-locked. That means two enormous changes for every one of us: first, our phones will restrict our internet access to child-friendly content only, and second, government-mandated AI software will constantly monitor our messages, video calls and photo albums for verboten activity. The only way to escape Starmer’s Great British Firewall and get regular internet access is to undergo a digital ID check on the device to register yourself as an adult user. Convenient, perhaps, for a Prime Minister who has failed to get a digital ID system through the front door. This is a total reshaping of modern civil liberty – a remodelling of internet access, a strangulation of freedom of information, and a death sentence for online anonymity and privacy. That such extreme, illiberal measures could be more appealing to our politicians than the more natural and effective solution of parental responsibility reveals a deeper malaise in British culture. The uncomfortable truth is that many parents no longer want the burden of supervising their children in the digital playground... Starmer’s national child-lock policy is performative authoritarianism. It is disturbing that it is so popular. In practice, children will be no safer at all and, of course, many will simply use adult-registered phones. Parents overwhelmingly buy their children’s phones and allow them to set them up – only a third of parents use the extensive parental software controls already available to limit children’s phone use. A child need only access a parent or sibling’s ID to set up the phone to get regular internet access. But the price that the rest of the country will pay for the slide towards infantilising control of the internet is significant. In every other democracy, smartphones are portals to the largest library in human history. In Starmer’s Britain, those same devices are being devalued to become, in effect, state-controlled spyware in our pockets. And why stop at smartphones? What about all the horrible things unsupervised children can see on tablets, games consoles, laptops, and desktop computers? If we accept the principle of passports for internet access now, we should expect ID gateways across millions more devices soon. Moreover, why stop at scanning for nudes? What about the multitudes of other online “harms” one can experience, that the Government has long targeted: from content that can affect mental health to so-called “misinformation”? How long before scanning software begins flagging speech a future government simply doesn’t like? No other country in the world has plunged its population into a child-restricted internet and required ID for regular web access. The Home Office proudly plastered digital ads across the internet this week heralding that Britain will be the “first country in the world” to introduce these so-called child safety measures – an ID gateway to the internet, population-wide spyware and a chokehold on Britons’ internet access. But it’s not a “first” to be proud of. Who exactly are we competing with here? Iran? North Korea? China? The question is not whether children should be protected online, but how. Every generation inherits liberties it did not have to fight for. The test is whether we can pass them on intact. If Starmer’s Great British Firewall becomes a reality, future generations will not remember it as a child safety policy. It will be remembered as the moment Britain introduced digital gatekeepers. If we accept that adults must gain permission to access the open internet, we will only be handing the next generation a new fight for liberty."
Social media ban is Starmer’s desperate scramble for a legacy - "He may even have Kemi Badenoch to thank. The Tory leader, who has been campaigning for a ban since the start of the year, said Sir Keir had been forced into the move because parents had backed her demands for action... It fits into a pattern of bold announcements from departing prime ministers, who often feel more free to follow their instincts once the shackles are off. Rishi Sunak similarly opted for a ban as his legacy, announcing in October 2023 that he would introduce a bill to eventually outlaw smoking altogether. He described the legislation, which would gradually raise the legal age for smoking until nobody could buy cigarettes, as evidence of “the type of leadership that I bring”. In the end he could not get the law past a fractured Tory party before the 2024 election, but it was picked up by Labour and will now become a reality. Before him there was Boris Johnson, who decided to sign off in a rather different style. The former prime minister, who was known for his love of a big infrastructure project, made the approval of Sizewell C one of his last acts in office. In a speech delivered on September 1 2022 – five days before he left No 10 for the final time – he announced £700m of new funding for the power plant, and urged his successor to “go nuclear and go large”. The need for Sizewell C was made all the more pressing because of the legacy wish of his predecessor, Theresa May, who used her final few weeks in office to pass one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in British political history. Baroness May was already halfway out the exit door in June 2019 when she enshrined in law the commitment to reach net zero by 2050. The legislation completely redrew the UK’s energy and industrial policies, with ongoing consequences. Earlier this month she defended her decision, arguing that the move had helped create 1.1 million jobs and generated £105bn in economic value, saying this was “proof that tackling climate change and growing the economy can go hand in hand”. Her premiership was dominated in real time by the infighting over Brexit that ultimately brought about her demise. But, seven years on, it is net zero that has proved to be the most controversial aspect of her long-term legacy... Gordon Brown... could see the writing on the wall well before the 2010 election. With Labour’s popularity in freefall and election defeat looking almost certain, he used his final full Budget in 2009 to pursue a nakedly socialist agenda. Top of the list was the introduction of the 50p tax rate, which jettisoned New Labour’s previous aversion to over-taxing wealth creators. Though the 50p rate would last just two years, its impact has been far more long-term... In his last full year in office, Sir Tony rammed through 46 acts including the Climate Change Act, which was the precursor to net zero; the Equality Act, which brought in diversity rules; and the Legislative and Regulatory Act, which handed No 10 sweeping powers to bypass Parliament that have since been widely used by ministers of all stripes. Those reforms continue to hugely influence Britain to this day, but for the ordinary voter, it was another of Sir Tony’s final acts that had the most obvious effect on their day-to-day lives. That was the introduction, on July 1 2007, of the indoor smoking ban. That he, Mr Sunak and now Sir Keir have all reached for health-related bans to try to cement their legacies is evidence both of how relatively easy they are to introduce and how enduringly popular they remain with the public."
Left wingers still bash the Tories as "far right" despite so many left wing policies
The Government has grown too comfortable with censorship - "The Government’s control over information available to the public is tightening. The rise of censorship and narrative control for our “safety” is one of the most disturbing trends to emerge in modern politics – and unless there is a course correction, it risks becoming a permanent feature of public life... the Government quietly introduced new powers for Ofcom to “crackdown” on social media companies during a crisis. Responding to incidents like disorder outside migrant hotels and the Belfast riots, the powers will force foreign tech companies to police Briton’s speech online even more rigorously than usual. Companies will also have to open a direct channel to law enforcement, lending weight to concerns that the Government increasingly sees big tech as an extension of the state. Police forces will be invited to direct the companies to censorship action – despite the fact that many recent “crises” in our country arise from the public losing trust in the police, whether in the case of Sarah Everard or Henry Nowak. Ofcom has admitted that these powers will push platforms to develop a crisis response that “prioritises speech of moderation over accuracy” resulting in “false positives” – that is, lawful speech being wrongly removed. Ofcom accepts that, given the nature of crises, such wrongly censored speech will include “the most highly protected forms of expression” spanning religion, political speech, and journalism and will “adversely impact users’ rights” to free speech – but maintains it is simply better to prioritise safety. Herein lies the problem. Over the past decade in Britain, censorship has been shedding its stigma. On the altar of safety, it has developed from one of the dark arts people in power could only get away with behind doors, to official policy. Digital censorship peaked during the Covid pandemic. The failure of the Covid Inquiry to hold the government to account for its sinister mass monitoring of public speech means this was not a mistake to be learnt from. It was an exercise to be repeated. Not only has the inquiry effectively scrubbed the extraordinary overreach of this surveillance operation from the official record, its findings encourage ever-greater counter-misinformation efforts. In response to an official “Rule 9” request for evidence from the inquiry, I submitted a dossier of irrefutable evidence of the daily monitoring and censorship of dissenting parliamentarians, journalists, world-leading scientists, and ordinary Britons. These were critics who were maligned as spreaders of “misinformation” despite expressing lawful, and as it would transpire, entirely accurate concerns spanning preparedness, lockdowns, school closures, vaccine policies, Covid passports and other social restrictions... Really? There was nothing “inappropriate” in turning the British Army inwards to monitor the lawful speech of the domestic population? Nothing inappropriate in logging posts by Sir David Davis MP in government “disinformation” reports intended for foreign hostile threats, to record that he was being “highly critical of the government”? Nothing inappropriate about spending public money recording the activities of Oxford University’s Prof Carl Heneghan, whose Twitter profile was suspended, simply for pointing out certain social restrictions had no scientific basis? The inquiry was told how the government even had to issue a formal apology to journalist Julie Hartley-Brewer after it transpired they had wrongly branded her a “vaccine sceptic” in a secret report sent to 64 officials across the UK as well as US counter-terror officials. How can any of this be remotely “appropriate”? The inquiry not only ignored the evidence of wrongdoing by the counter-misinformation units – it praised them, and then buried the evidence. It made no reference to the evidence I submitted in its report and failed to publish it, despite its duty to publish all the written evidence it received. The inquiry claimed this was an “administrative oversight” and explained it prioritises the publication of documents it referenced in the report. What a curious approach from a supposedly neutral inquiry. Imagine if judges could scrub bundles of evidence to only keep exhibits that support the prosecution and not the defence? The truth is that counter-misinformation powers provide the establishment the perfect premise on which to insulate itself from the forces of dissent. They fit perfectly with the technocratic view that public opinion is a question of information management rather than of democratic freedom. And so, as long as this status quo prevails, no amount of evidence of overreach or abuse will make the Government row back from censorship powers – quite the opposite. Starmer’s raft of online “safety” policies stand to make the UK’s internet one of the most controlled in the democratic world. We will have to win the principled argument that citizens in a democracy have the right to hear, debate and judge for ourselves. We will have to win the battle between liberty and technocracy."
Hey, Starmer, leave those kids alone | Christopher Snowdon | The Critic Magazine - "We will continue to regress as a society until we learn to judge new legislation by its likely consequences rather than by the intentions of its advocates. The looming ban on under-16s having access to platforms “whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material” has all the hallmarks of another government failure. It has already been tried — and failed — in Australia. It is being framed as an attack on Big Tech rather than its satisfied customers. It has been pushed through by the conflicted old media off the back of a narrow selection of bereaved parents who have been used a human shield against criticism. It seems designed to give Starmer a “legacy”. These are all red flags. So too is the familiar refrain that the ban will not be a “silver bullet” and that the public should therefore brace themselves for further restrictions. (Many of the problems the ban is supposed to address were meant to have been solved by the Online Safety Act. Remember that?). In his early morning address to the nation, Starmer urged us to not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Teenagers sometimes drink alcohol, he said, but that was no reason not to ban the sale of alcohol to children. Fair enough, you might say, but leaving aside the fact that children can legally drink alcohol in Britain from the age of five, reducing some teenagers’ access to social media is clearly not perfect, but is it even good? The consequences of Australia’s “world leading” social media ban have been largely ignored by those who seek to emulate it, but any attempt to create evidence-based policy must start there. The Australian government’s eSafety commissioner found that 70 per cent of parents said their children still had active social media accounts three months after the “social media minimum age” was introduced. If, like Wes Streeting, you think that social media is as bad as tobacco, this sounds like a modest but non-trivial improvement, but who are the teenagers being denied this means of communication and what platforms are the rest using? Evidence from Australia is still emerging but the concern is that those who are unable to use websites that the majority of their peers are accessing illicitly will suffer from social isolation. In many cases, these are kids who are marginalised and unpopular in the first place. As for the rest, there are plenty of ways to get around age restrictions. Facial recognition software has proven to be laughably easy to bypass in Australia and there is nothing to stop a parent setting up a phone in their own name and giving it to their child. VPNs are readily available and other interactive spaces that boomers are less familiar with have been growing in popularity in Australia as alternatives to the mainstream networks. The problem with many of these options is that they lack the guardrails that are currently available to parents. Using standard, pre-installed software on any iPhone, parents can set the number of hours their children can use their phone, control the time of day that it can be used, ensure that the content they see is family friendly and shut the phone down completely. None of these safeguards are available if the child is logged in as an adult or using an unregulated website via VPN. This is why the Molly Rose Foundation has warned that the “the unintended consequences of a social media ban for young people” could be “substantial”. Even UNICEF has warned that it could “backfire”... I, too, miss the days when 14 year olds spent their summer holidays playing video games and spent their time after school drinking cider and setting off fireworks. On more than one occasion I have urged my daughter to come downstairs so we can watch television like a proper family, lecturing her about how we didn’t have all this Snapchat when I was growing up. But the world moves on. What I have learned from my relatively laissez-faire approach is that the kids are alright. Early exposure to social media seems to have given my daughter and her friends a degree of justifiable scepticism about things that are said online that many of their elders could learn from. It has not suppressed her desire to socialise one bit. On the contrary, it has been a complement to it, and a cure for boredom. Incidentally, she laughed when I told her about the social media ban and asked sardonically if it would work as well as the ban on disposable vapes. This is, of course, only my personal experience and opinion — my “lived experience” — but that seems to be all that matters in policy-making these days."
Meme - Rothmus: "Starmer is rolling out age verification so the state can censor and surveil everyone. "The children" is the oldest pretext in the authoritarian playbook."
Trojan Horse exterior: "PROTECTING CHILDREN"
Trojan Horse interior: "SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP AND TRACKING"
Person dragging Trojan Horse: "KEIR STARMER"
People welcoming Trojan Horse: "UK"
GB Politics on X - "🚨NEW: Bluesky will not be included in the under-16s social media ban"
☀️AliquisNovus☀️ on X - "Two-Tierism is quickly becoming an automatic reflex of the Yookay. Literally every new policy has some carved-out exceptions for allies of the ruling regime, and there isn’t even an attempt at subtlety with it, either."
End Time Headlines on X - "🚨 The UK Government is plotting a full-scale digital ID lockdown on every smartphone, teaming up with Big Tech giants like Google and Apple to force mandatory age verification and ID checks for unrestricted access. Leaked proposals reveal ministers are pushing stringent systems under the Online Safety Act—framed as child protection—that could limit messaging, browsing, streaming, and more for non-verified users, effectively requiring passports or biometrics just to use your phone freely. Critics warn this crosses the Rubicon into widespread surveillance, eroding privacy and anonymity for millions of adults in what could become one of the world's most restrictive internet regimes. https://endtimeheadlines.org/2026/06/uk-gov ernment-plots-digital-id-lockdown-on-every-phone-in-lockstep-with-big-tech/ #DigitalID #SurveillanceState #UKLockdown"
Melissa Chen on X - "Under the pretext of banning under-16s from social media to “protect the children,” Keir Starmer has snuck in some small print that should make Americans really glad that all the tea was dumped into the Boston harbour back in 1773. Adults will still be “allowed” to use the platforms… once they’ve handed over facial recognition, digital ID, passport, or credit card details to prove they’re not a child. So it was never really about the kids. It was about making sure every single person who wants to speak online has to first tell the government exactly who they are.
Step 1: Link your real identity to your speech
Step 2: police have a lovely searchable database of every spicy take, meme, or complaint you’ve ever posted
Step 3: bring in the consequences - arrests, travel ban, debunking, for out-of-bounds speech
The UK is in a free fall."
WasAcop on X - "🚨Labour confirms ID requirement at device level - VPNs useless.🚨 By forcing Apple and Google to verify age at the device level during phone setup… Keir Starmer’s government isn’t protecting kids — it’s building a surveillance infrastructure. The OS itself will restrict platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X, making VPNs largely useless because the block happens before any traffic leaves your phone. 🚨Once every device carries a verified age profile, authorities gain an easy route to identify users through legal requests to tech firms. This is digital ID by the back door, sold as child safety. Classic Labour: expand state control first, ask questions later."
WasAcop on X - "🚨 UK plans: Every phone must enforce mandatory age verification at OS level to block nudity/porn for kids. You’d have to prove you’re 18+ with Face ID-style biometrics, passport/driving licence upload + live face match, or credit card check. Once done, the OS stores a permanent “adult flag” in the secure chip. No verification = permanent child mode. Filters can’t be turned off. Is this not just a backdoor Digital ID for everyone? They start with “protecting children”… but now every adult has to register their identity with Big Tech + government to use their own device unrestricted."
Andre Omietanski on X - "On 22 May 2026, @AztecLabs_ submitted a response to the UK government's consultation on children's online safety. I'll be direct about where we stand. We are sceptical of mandatory age verification. The evidence that it works is mixed, and the surveillance infrastructure built in the name of child safety rarely stays narrowly scoped. We said so plainly in the submission. But the consultation is happening, and if the government proceeds, the detail that matters most is how these systems are actually built. Every method deployed today related to online age verification either gets bypassed easily or forces users to hand a document scan to a third-party server, which creates centralised databases of sensitive personal data. Those databases get breached often and easily, creating personal and national security risks. This is the predictable result of collecting far more than the question requires. So our submission, among other things, asks the government for three things:
1. make privacy by design a hard requirement rather than an aspiration;
2. recognise device-level proofs within the existing trust framework; and
3. do not restrict VPNs, which serve real privacy and security purposes.
The UK can set the global standard for how this is done, or it can attach a breachable identity database to every platform its citizens use. I think the choice is clear."
LASHFORD on X - "PAY ATTENTION @chrisluxonmp 👇 Signal: Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all."
Basil the Great on X - "🚨BREAKING: UK GOVERNMENT TO TAKE CONTROL OF YOUTUBE ALGORITHM. This is pure authoritarianism. Keir Starmer's/Andy Burnham's Government is set to control the YouTube algorithm by LAW stipulating that they must push "APPROVED CONTENT" to UK Citizens. And independent voices who criticise the government will be pushed to the back of the queue making it harder for people to find. YouTube has acknowledged this is happening. This must be stopped"
PeterSweden on X - "The British government wants to force social media to boost the BBC. Which will effectively downrank independent journalists. This is called tyrrany. This is not something a free country does."
Weird. We used to be told that government influence on the media was fascism
