I’ve spent the last few days composing a response to the government’s consultation on whether to introduce a statutory minimum age for sites like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. The consultation, announced on 19 January, was intended to spike the guns of Lord Nash, a Conservative peer who’d proposed an amendment to the Schools Bill banning under-16s from social media. It didn’t work and his amendment was carried two days later, although he was later persuaded to withdraw it after the government tabled its own amendment pledging to impose some kind of ban regardless.
The only speech by an MP to be age-gated was Katie Lam quoting from the transcript of a grooming gang trial
Meaningless though the consultation is, I thought I’d respond because it was a chance to urge the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to activate the remaining free speech clauses in the Online Safety Act (OSA). The act received Royal Assent in October 2023, but three of the four ‘keep up’ duties, as opposed to the ‘take down’ ones, are still dormant. That means social media companies are much more likely to be fined by Ofcom for being too permissive than for being too restrictive.
One effect of this has been the over-zealous ‘age-gating’ of content deemed unsuitable for people under 18, with decisions about what content to limit being politically biased. For instance, the only speech by an MP to be age-gated was by Katie Lam in which she quoted from the transcript of a grooming gang trial. Other material censored in this way include footage of the protests outside asylum hotels (but not footage from any of the pro-Palestinian marches); posts on X calling for single-sex spaces to be protected (but not posts by trans-rights activists saying: ‘The only good terf is a dead terf’); and a YouTube documentary by Spiked magazine about online censorship.
Those decisions were made by the social media companies themselves, so Ofcom cannot be blamed directly. But their reason for age-gating this content was their fear – entirely reasonable – that the regulator would hit them with massive fines if they didn’t. Indeed, the reason I voted for John Nash’s amendment is that I think an outright ban on under-16s accessing social media is preferable to leaving it to the platform moderators – and by extension Ofcom – to decide what they can and can’t see. Better to ban the woke content being pumped into their feeds by TikTok et al rather than impose an additional layer of left-wing bias from the top down.
My response to the consultation, therefore, didn’t take issue with the ban, but argued for the implementation of the remaining free speech duties and pleaded with the government to grant unrestricted access to this protected speech to those aged 16 and over. What we’re talking about here is ‘journalistic content’ and ‘content of democratic importance’, as defined by sections 17, 18 and 19 of the OSA. Those clauses have been commenced, but they only apply to social media companies designated as ‘category one’ providers by Ofcom and – blow me – the regulator hasn’t got around to classifying them yet. In the absence of those duties having any bite, the platforms are free to decide what journalistic and political material to restrict, with the rule being that right-wing content is censored and left-wing content available to all.
I fear that when the remaining free speech duties do come into force – if they ever do – the government will make it clear to Ofcom that they only apply to those aged 18 and over. That’s particularly nonsensical given that Labour is about to reduce the voting age to 16. How are 16- and 17-year-olds supposed to make informed decisions about which party to vote for if the social media companies decide what political content they’re allowed to see? If they’re mature enough to vote, they’re surely old enough to watch speeches by Katie Lam, footage of anti-immigration protests and videos by Spiked without being permanently psychologically harmed.
I suspect the reason Labour has proved so reluctant to ban under-16s from social media is precisely because it’s planning to lower the voting age to 16. The party high-ups know that the online slop served up to kids is turning them into budding little socialists, which is why polls indicate a simple majority of the newly enfranchised will vote Labour. So the government is desperately trying to avoid an outright ban and leave the existing regime in place. Which is a good illustration of why the OSA was such a bad idea in the first place, something even its biggest cheerleader, Nadine Dorries, now admits: if you give politicians the ability to influence what voters can see on social media, they will inevitably exploit that to serve their own political ends.
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