Watch online instead.
This morning Keir Starmer announced a ban on social media for under-16s in the UK. To bat away the obvious objection that bans never work perfectly, he reached for the booze analogy: we don’t abandon the rule against selling alcohol to children, he said, just because the odd teenager manages to get served. But being age-checked for a social media account is much more troubling than being asked for ID before you’re served a pint, it’s a bad analogy, and here’s why.
It’s simple, and we do need simple stories to tell about tech. But it’s completely mistaken. First, selling alcohol is a tightly regulated, licenced activity. A pub or restaurant must hold a licence before it can sell a drink to anyone. You cannot set up a stall and sell alcohol in the street. The people serving it are licenced too. Social media has no equivalent with platforms who operate under no comparable licence. And this is precisely the point that many of those calling for a better digital environment for children have been making for years: regulate the Very Large Online Platforms, the VLOPS, the providers, — as other countries in Europe already do — not the people walking into them.
Second, when you go into a bar you aren’t asked for proof of age unless someone wants to sell you alcohol. Order a soft drink and the bartender never asks. Not everyone is checked by default without a choice.
Third, the assessment is made by a human being who asks you nothing at all if you look over 25. They only ask under-25s for proof of age. You then flash them an ID, which one employee glances at. They don’t take a copy. They don’t ask you to pose for the camera, or turn left and right to prove you’re a real person, and keep the photos. They don’t send your ID to another company outside the bar to confirm you exist. And they certainly don’t use it to train an AI model and develop their age-checking product further, relying on you to opt out rather than opt in. Tellingly, what a bar actually needs is proof of age — but what it asks for is ID. That is how easily one slips into the other: asking for far more info than they should.
The more honest analogy is this. Imagine everyone walking down the street before going into a bar — whether they intend to buy alcohol or not — just because you go into that space you are age-checked by facial recognition through CCTV you never wanted, and only get told afterwards that you could have refused.
It is misleading for the Prime Minister, or anyone else, to suggest the privacy concerns here are no more serious than being ID’d for a pint. It shows how poorly our politicians grasp the policy, and the technology behind it that they are introducing that change the controls on where you can go anonymously in your daily life.
Journalists: it’s your job to be more curious than this. Challenge the metaphors. Understand the technology and the enormous consequences of what’s being introduced. And ask why they’re so keen to make something this substantial appear so trivial.
In fact, thinking of the bars, makes me think of a joke. Three Children’s Commissioners walk into a bar, From England, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. The first says, “ban all children even up to 18.” The other two, say, “don’t ban children that would be mean and disproportionate and may cause other harms”, and then the Welsh Commissioner comes in later and says, “England you’re on your own. The only Children’s Commissioner who wants a ban and the only one in the world suggesting 18.” Actually it’s not a joke. Perhaps we should stop with the bar analogies. And rethink a social media ban.