This week parliament will attempt to conclude legislation allowing the government to ban young people from social media. It’s taken weeks of ‘ping-pong’ to land on the specific form that these restrictions will take, and there has been no shortage of ideas. Tory peer Lord Nash’s proposals would introduce a blanket ban on all social media for under-16s, while the government is angling to implement restrictions on features and even introduce online curfews.

We’ll soon find out what the final compromise will be. But from an online safety, privacy and civil liberties standpoint, the details hardly matter. The wave of a legislative wand will not magically banish children from social media. The only way to do this is to force every single user to submit to invasive biometric face scans or digital ID uploads. 

The ban will not solve the fundamental reason why young people spend so much time online

The ban will not solve the fundamental reason why young people spend so much time online

It is not hard to see that for all the good intentions, age-based restrictions to social media amount to a Trojan horse for a de facto mandatory digital ID system. Biometric face scans, often falsely presented as a privacy-safe method of age verification, will fail for millions of people: no algorithm can tell the difference between a 16-year-old on the day of their birthday and the day before. Many more users – adults with facial disabilities, young-looking women, or anyone who isn’t white – will face a significantly higher risk of being prompted to upload an ID document because the algorithm cannot accurately verify their age.........

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