Going to the Ballot Bot

I wanted to flag a story that happened over the weekend here in the UK, which is...

A little bit more detail on the UK social media ban, which has obviously been a big story here in the UK, but has also filtered into this broader narrative of social media bans across Europe and the world, actually, as we saw in Australia last year.

The culture secretary here in the UK announced that it was going to come into force in March 2027, which is a new date, something that we didn't fully know.

But also there's a kind of a bit more detail on the potential approach, which I gleaned from an interview with her in The Guardian, which she said that a kind of strict policy, social media ban for under-16s was a bit like deciding that your town centre is dangerous and then making all children stay in their bedrooms, which I thought was a really interesting analogy.

And there's a little bit of a shift from the previous Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who, because of lots of parental campaigns, very much was in favour of this under-16s ban by the end.

So I think we'll see a bit of a shift towards the European model of a feature-based tiered approach that It's more respecting of children's rights as they graduate through their teens.

What's your kind of view of the band's wholesale? And where are you expecting that to go in the last part of this year going into 2027?

I think you're right about the feature-based stuff.

I think, as you guys have talked about a ton, it is really hard to verify someone's age.

It is very hard in which to do that.

And two, kids are really clever and they know how to get around bands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They know how to, you know, if they're going to want to see it, they're going to figure out a way to get around it.

And so you're better off thinking about rather than just being like, you can't be on it at all.

How do we think about a way that you can do so in a responsible way, right? In a way that helps you to think about like, How much time should I be spending on these screens? What is it doing to my attention span? What is it doing? Like, is the stuff that I'm seeing the stuff I want to be seeing? How do I curate my feed in a way that I want to? How do I limit my time? Like stuff like that.

So I think that's the approach I prefer a lot more than I do about just this wholesale ban because I just don't think it works.

Yeah, I think that's where a lot of people are landing actually in the kind of policy and political sphere right now.

And to your point about kids being smart, people may have seen or been surfaced a video by This American Life this week, which actually talks about a story that Mike and I flagged on the podcast Best Part of 12 months ago, where kids that have been banned from social media are going to Spotify and going to individual episodes of old NPR podcasts and using that as a forum.

Chat.

Incredible.

Like whoever's coordinating that as a genius.

I had a friend of mine, I will not say who, but she was telling us how her son has been able to watch YouTube videos through Google Maps.

No.

And like figured out a workaround to