Midweek Quick Take: Yookay yooth social media ban gets a Potemkin pilot

Also: in conversation with Louise Perry

I’m pleased to announce that my Socrates In The City conversation with the brilliant and beautiful Louise Perry of Maiden Mother Matriarch is now live. In this wide-ranging conversation, we explored (among other things) “the feminisation of society”, the consolidation of online emotional panic as a field of public life, and Louise’s thesis on the real reason for declining fertility rates.

Watch it here:

The How of Restricting Social Media

Also in the news, the UK government is to conduct a pilot ban on social media for British teenagers, as part of its consultation on whether to enact an Australia-style social media ban for teenagers. Hundreds of young people will have their social media use restricted in different ways, from parentally-managed restrictions to overnight bans, to complete exclusion. Researchers will gather qualitative feedback on how this affected the youth and their families (and how they set about hacking the restrictions).

But there’s something fishy going on here. The measures being trialled in this pilot are not all that different from what averagely responsible parents already employ. But the ban being consulted on by the government is different in kind: not a set of optional restrictions enforced by parents, as in this trial, but state-wide bans on social media for all young people, presumably to be enforced not by parents but through technological means.

Others have already highlighted the real effect of such measures, which is to impose mandatory ID verification on everybody, for access to whatever websites end up marked as “sensitive”. The surveillance and censorship implications should be obvious.

Now: I’m supportive in principle of efforts to reduce the amount of time young people spend doomscrolling. But the only way to impose restrictions of this kind without tacking on unacceptable levels of universal state surveillance is to re-affirm parental authority over, and responsibility for, their offspring. Meanwhile, the trend under every government for decades has been toward replacing such authority with that of the state. Latterly, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the same state has also sought to exert ever greater control over our information environments. Put these suspicions together, and this “pilot” feels less like a genuine research exercise and more like a Potemkin trial. That is, it’s an exercise in going through the motions on parental authority, before the real proposed policy is trotted out: one that, we can reasonably expect, will route round parental authority entirely, while somehow entailing a new requirement for everyone to show their passport before accessing any website Keir Starmer decides should be off-limits.

That’s it for now! Later this week: part 2 in my series on post-print selfhood (part 1 here).