Future of the internet and youth

Sky News, The full story first. Despite being targeted at under sixteenens, the social media ban is going to affect everyone in the UK who uses the internet. This is why. When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there's no room for slowdowns. With Granger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts, and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done Call one eight hundred Ganger, click ranger. com or just stop by. Granger for the ones who get it done Dear Prime Minister Kiir Starmer, I write to you with regards to the U sixteen' social media ban. I am concerned about your solution to this growing threat to young people. I can understand your concerns, but you just didn't execute it right. Maybe ask your children their opinions. Now I'm going to make it very clear that this letter to number ten is not mine, instead the views of a rather aggrieved ten year old. As for any response from Downing Street I imagine it will be pretty similar to what the PM said when launching the policy. The need for action could not be any clearer. Social media is making our children unhappy and unsafe Even the grumpy ten year old would concede that kids should always be safe online. Having thought about it, I just wonder if we've all forgotten something pretty important And it's that for the band to work It's going to require everyone over the age of sixteen to give up some of their privacy. Will Garnett is a tech journalist who's long focused on online safety. It' always great to have you on the podcast. and so much to talk about on this particular topic. Let's start with the basics though. What has the government announced? and why Well, the government has announced the restriction of social media platforms firstly for under sixteen from and as yet announced date for early next year, that's going to be platforms like Instagram, TikTok WhatsApp? and YouTube and there's uncertainty around and other platforms. So Blue skky isn't mentioned in their list. I've heard a tech secretary saying Blue skky is in the list. So there's still a little bit of uncertainty over what's actually in the banned list. But also the government has said importantly that for the first time ever kids aren't going to be able to use chat within game apps and game services to chat to strangers. That's going to be switched on as default now rather than being a parental option. And there's also some also slightly nebulous guidance around sexualized and romantic chat boss at the moment Young people under sixteen are going to be banned from using those. There was also some talk about curfews for sixteen to eighteen year olds after ten PM. I've also heard after eight thirty PM. and I've also heard the Tch seecretary again this morning say they're going to announce something on that in July despite it not being included in the report. it seem The reason why that's not revealed in what we've had announced this week is the government hasn't even finished its own analysis of a pilot, which is due to land in July. So that might lead us to the point that this has been communicated slightly sooner than the government had originally planned. confused perhaps as to the detail of specifically what parts of the internet will be affected. But I assume not very confused when it comes to the overarching purpose. I mean, it's online safety. We know that kids are not necessarily entirely protected, entirely safe when they're online. No, that's correct. That's correct. It's all about online safety. The impetus is very much on the tech companies. The government seems to be saying how this is going to be regulated and how this is going to be enforced is down to offcOM We already know that when it comes to the Online Safety Act, OCOom has levied something like five point five million pounds worth of fines against tech companies and have currently got fifty five grand back into the bank. So those fines have been levied and they've not been able to actually get them to the extent that one organization called FCan, an Internet Community Message Board sent an AI generated photograph of a hamster giant hamster aauding over London and sent that as their legal response to the regulator. So many, many questions come from yesterday's announcement as to how this is going to be enforced and whether this is performative politics or real change is going to happen. I've got an even more fundamental question for you, Will How do you make sure that under sixteen don't get onto these aspects of the internet? Well, it's a really good question and the government till this point has continually referred to what's happened in Australia and is even referring to its own plans here as Australia plus. But when you start asking them about enforcement and how they're going to do this, because it's been an abject failure in Australia, regardless of whether you say there are elements of success in the overall plan, because seventy percent of Australian under sixteenens who were on social media before the ban, say they're still on afterwards. seven and ten seeven and ten are still on it. That's from the E commommissioner's own research now in Australia. So The challenge you face is the technical responses to this Are quite blunt and are quite limited. And little did I know foolishly when I on air yesterday showed a one second click of how quickly I could change my location from London to Los Angeles on my phone and therefore circumventing the gaps. I will be retweeted by everybody from the Reform party ton to government ministers. It's been viewed over a million times in twenty four hours and there are many challenges to this And the government keeps saying there are many challenges to it, but they're denying the fact it is so simple to break what's currently in place. So unless they do something different in the UK compared to what was used in Australia, this is really just performance politics, because I spoke to a journalist in Australia yesterday who told me in the newsroom to verify an under sixteen's account falsely to keep getting access to services on Australia. They used a press photograph of Michael Jackson from nineteen eighty three, and they were able to get through what was classed as top grade Australian encryption and protection to give age verification So if we're using those services in the UK, this is not going to work in any way, shape or form. So let's hope the government comes out with something new in July that I don't know about at the moment I do wonder whether we're missing perhaps a bigger question here And it's pretty straightforward. If we are banning under sixteenens from social media in the way in which you have described does that mean that the rest of us have to prove that we're over sixteen. That was my overwhelming thought yesterday in that it would appear that with pretty much everything, we are going to have to opt in to prove we are of age and over the age of sixteen or eighteen. Do you think everyone know this? Do you think anyone recognes this will I don't think it's been properly spellt out by the government because they're saying that young people are going to have and they still haven't confirmed this, but restricted access to chat GPT and other chat bots because they say they want kids to use chat bots, but they don't want them getting into age inappropriate circumstances and conversations with those chat bots. So in order to do that, we're all going to have to age verify ourselves to prove that I can have that spicy chat with chat GPT or Grock or whatever takes my fancy that week. So we're in a situation where pretty much everything is going to find ourselves in that situation. And off the record yesterday in a conversation with somebody, It was even suggested to me and I'm not going to say who this came from, but it was suggested to me that even VPNs might get age verification because that might be a way of stopping young people using VPNs. But the biggest issue here is age verification is accurate to an extent. Where it's bad is between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. It's because of facial features and all of those things. it does not work as reliably. And even the companany selling it to businesses like Microsoft, Sony, all kinds of companies use services for age verification. They say the one poor spot in our whole visibility at the moment is that young audience exactly the types of people that we're meant to be protecting here. Hold on just for a second Are you saying that we are about to enter at some point next year a world where everyone who wants to access Large chunks of the internet from the United Kingdom will either have to find a workaround or will have to identify themselves to someone somewhere. We are all going to be forced into looading some form of identification, some form of proof of who we are. Before we can speak to G, go on YouTube or whatever, that's quite a fundamental change to the internet If the government is not doing that, they haven't told us what they are going to do. because at the moment there seems to be an awful lot of proof that you're of age to use these services. They're not saying how they're going to do that, but they keep coming back to that's for the tech companies to fix or the regulator to legislate against. So you find yourself in a situation where You don't have the answers, but you have to start filling in some of the blanks because I'm not convinced I'm going to get all the answers to the questions I've posed like I'm being promised by representatives of the government. So it's right that you would automatically go into an idea of that happening. but one of the bigger issues for me is as somebody that genuinely believes that need to protect young people online. I do a lot of work in child safety and I would suggest that more does need to be done here. and the idea of this becoming a big ID play. is something that damages and harms the validity of what the government are attempting to do. Whenever a prime mininister or a leading member the cabinet stands up and says, we'll be tough on tech companies. what is the ultimate sanction? Because I don't genuinely believe you can switch off most services in the UK now. And when you've got a trillionaire at the helm of one of these companies involved in this, who does not give a monkeys And has just launched his own satellite system to broadcast internet around the world, he's not going to play with the regulator if at some point he's told he has to. So I don't know what the ultimate sanction is, and the government keeps saying there is an ultimate sanction, but they've never proved they're going to use it because nobody's paying the fines that the regulator is levying so far for online safety act failures. Doesn't that just suggest that there isn't a solution to this will that actually there isn't a way around this. You can either have an internet in which you remain anonymous and children get abused or you can have children not getting abused and everyone has to identify who they are That's true. You can mitigate risk, but you can't have the two things because the anonymous internet will always get abused by somebody and it pains me to say that but that is the reality of where we find ourselves. And you also wonder just what the big tech companies are actually gonna to do about it. Do the tech companies then really take this whole idea of protection and looking after young people seriously Or is it still not the top of their agenda? And how do you get it to the top of their agenda to start dealing with this Granger knows, when you're a procurement manager for an office park You're not managing one building. you're managing all of them And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners Light's about to fail, filters ready to clog, HVac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind Count on Granger for quality products, easy reordering and twenty four seven support Call one eight hundred Granger, click Granger. com or just stop by Granger. For the ones who get it done If you introduce restrictions, for example, like know an internet curfew, an end to doom scrolling for under sixteenens It would be quite easy then, given that you have the framework in place to do that for kids people under the age of sixteen, to do that for everyone. I mean, there could be a creep in what the government wants these companies to do. And rather than it just a blank to my son, for example, it could could apply to all of us But that's the worry and the challenge. There's an awful lot of potential creep in all of this, which is why I understand those who may be more conspiratorially led than me or convinced that everything is a plan of the deep state have some skin in the game here becausecause there is the risk of the potential that these things could be turned or used against us. The government could suddenly say that despite advising their own people to use them to protect data, that a virtual private network suddenly becomes something deemed a suspicious or dodgy activity by people, despite millions of us using them for genuine purposes, not just circumventing TV rights to get the World Cup or whatever from a different country, but using them for genuine purposes for work or protection. So you do find yourself in a place where the government doesn't really know how to communicate about technology. I don't think it fully understands technology. and then it leads us to all be more confused about what's in and what's out. Because if you look at the coverage from the last twenty four hours, there is still people not sure whether blue sky is in or out, for example the ban looks like on YouTube and some other general questions which should be really clear and simple and should have been fully communicated. I don't want to be hyperbolic, but as a result of genuine concerns for the safety of young people when they are online Isn't it the case that everything that we've been discussing makes it pretty clear that the internet, at least for those of us who use it in the United Kingdom, is going to be a very, very different place. Accessing the internet, enjoying the internet, being active online is going to be entirely different as a result of what are ostensibly child protection measures Yeah, I think that's right. But as somebody that has seen the first hand impact on young people, that's not a great skin off of my nose if I have to do an annual verification or once or twice. you know, in order to prove who I am, I'm actually fine with that. If stuff genuinely happens to improve the lot of those who find their lives you know turned upside down and properly messed up by the internet and technology. I guess the bigger issue here is, right? The tech companies have had an opportunity to be good citizens and helpful and supportive for years. This has been the mood music and the noise for ages and they've not really stepped into the responsibility of doing it. But it's strange, right? Be the internet's what thirty, thirty five years old, maybe slightly more, depending on who you are and how you've been using it. but none of this was ever planned in its growth and its development. It was created as almost like a place for academics to share information and it grew from there. And there's not really been any kind of responsible legislation or control. Likewise, the smartphone we've got in our pockets, right, seventy five thousand times more powerful than the computers that took humans to the moon None of us really know how to use it or how to harness it or how to get the most from it. The fact that I still get bothered by people every day on a train on speakerphone having a two way conversation at six in the morning just shows you that as a society, we don't get how this stuff works. And that applies to kids as well as adults. Well, of course, it is the under sixens that have been most exercised by what Kir Starmer said I have a letter in my hand from a very smart young man the age of ten, addressed to the Prime Minister in which he bangs on about how it's going to restrict his education and his ability to communicate. But he does have, just towards the end of this letter In the post to Downing Street already, he says, I have a solution for these would be issues while keeping the social media ban You and the government create a website People can post videos and shorts, but everything posted gets checked. The rules, no bad language seen by younger accounts, no violence. A suggestion is to make verifying accounts very strict, including scans and hard questions. That way children can watch things while being safe I mean, I'm just wondering if this ten year old might have hit the nail in the head here. If the social media companies had pulled their finger out in the first place and made sure that by themselves that young people were unable to see this sort of content, there would be no need for a ban in the first place. Isn't that right? I think the ten year old has actually nailed it on so many levels. I think a controlled place which children are safe in and is not obsessed potentially with advertising or getting the personal data of those kids, but it's a place they can share ideas. It shouldn't just be a utopian ideal. It should be something that an organisation somewhere looks to create and develop. So I reckon that ten year old might be the prrime mininister in the future and I might be talking about their reactions to technology in the next thirty or forty years. But isn't he basically just pointing out the fact that these tech companies have a business model that can only thrive without their being checks and guarantees in place that mean that he would be unable to access, completely unable to access the sort of material that I, as someone over the age of sixteen, should be entitled to Yeah, and I think that is very much the challenge. At the moment we don't have a two tier internet We don't have a kids internet and an adult's internet. And maybe that is the inherent design flaw that is faced here that the kind of content that we would be discussing or the views we would be expunging as adults, kids are equally exposed to that at the moment. and I don't necessarily know. How you go about doing that, unless we switch the internet off for a year or so and try and reinvent it. This is the challenge. The internet came and we all got on it and we all started using it. And it was a relatively long time, ten, fifteen, twenty years, before we started realizing the harms of the internet and the harms of social media. And I wonder how you go back and do it because one of the things that stuck with me in the last twenty four hours is that I hadn't really considered it before was this ban is all about the people like that young lad who messaged in and my daughter who's eight. This is all about protecting them if they haven't got onto social platforms and started using them. This isn't about the fourteen and a half year old who's really screaming against their parents because they've lost access to a service they love, because you're never going to properly get the genenie back in the bowl But what you might be able to do is start having some more sophisticated conversations with that younger generation to see what happens. And we don't know how that's going to be impacted yet. We haven't seen any of the results or data from that in Australia because it's a generational thing. It's going to take a couple of years before we can truly see what happens. But what's most important for me is I hope this doesn't become a political football I don't want the next government to go,, we're ripping it out. the UK needs freedom of speech etceta, etcetera, etcetera. It is admirable that somebody is attempting to protect young people and trying to do it. Whether or not we agree it's the right or the wrong solution. That's a conversation for another day. Sure. But am I wrong to feel that we are fundamentally losing something about the internet that was One of its fundamental tenets, you know, the idea that you could be whoever you wanted to be online, that you could be no one online that there was this full range of information out there for you to access. that know I get that the internet of nineteen ninety six and twenty twenty six are vastly different things but it just feels like It's not going to be the same place that it used to be I agree with you that we're losing something, but maybe we might gain something else, which is a little bit more time for young people to emotionally develop and set some boundaries. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. But we're going into a hell of a rocky period if you a group of let's say even optimistically, eleven to sixteen year olds are going to find themselves in a situation where they're not going to have access to something they've spent most of their time on. I don't want kids to suddenly find themselves without the internet and nobody guiding parents or helping people to take take kids through these hard conversations. That's an important role that people the government needs to play too. But genuinely, do you think ten years from now, people will be looking back on this moment, looking at their set of proposals and will see them as child protection as it entirely about child protection? orr was this the point at which everyone lost their anonymity on the internet I'm far more concerned about artificial intelligence and the harms of that on society. But I think in ten years time, actually no, I can't even imagine.