Inside the UK's under-16 social media ban - Heather Burns interview

One thing I should add is that for those who don't know, what the UK government is proposing here is banning YouTube for under-16s.

YouTube equals social media, which I think is true, but nonetheless...

I mean, we've also seen the UK's Online Safety Act potentially taking in Wikipedia.

So there is the possibility that Wikipedia might end up with age restrictions in the UK.

Wikipedia proactively went to court to try and get an assurance that this wasn't the case.

and they failed.

So there is no age restriction on Wikipedia in the UK just yet, but there might be.

That door has been left open.

And YouTube.

I mean...

Not to say that YouTube doesn't carry an awful lot of terrible stuff that can be very harmful and so on.

But what are the effects of that going to be on kids' education and understanding of the world around them?

So apparently YouTube is out, but YouTube Kids will be in, which just... raises the possibility for me of like you know 14 15 16 year olds trying to do their homework on the youtube kids interface which is great if you've got a toddler watching bluey and and what a deeply insulting sense of infantilization that will be to to deny these young children the chance to develop agency in seeking out the world and making decisions about the content they're viewing and just being told, no, this is all naughty.

On the subject of Wikipedia, talk about, you know, I told you so, because I saw that coming as soon as 2019.

Now, the reason they put Wikipedia in the scope of the law, believe it or not, is because there are articles on Wikipedia about suicide, eating disorders and self-harm, which in the minds of some politicians meant Wikipedia is encouraging people to do those things and people who want to do those things are looking at Wikipedia.

Of course, there's articles about those things on Wikipedia.

It's an encyclopedia.

But the political mind of the day said, okay, we've got to throw the whole damn Wikipedia in there.

Now, fast forward all these years later, and we had this year or last year, we had one of the Republican committees in the US sending a subpoena to Wikipedia to demand they reveal the identities of all the contributors to an article about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

That's why Wikipedia does not have age verification, because the wall between age verification and identity verification is very thin.

And if an online safety act style restriction had been in place at the time, which it wasn't because of the pending lawsuit in the UK, which they lost, as you said, that congressional committee would have been able to get a list from Wikipedia.

Here are the people who had these opinions about Israel-Palestine.

And where in the current political context does that go? So this is classic, I told you so.

Something that was a ridiculous idea in 2019 because of eating disorders, which I'm not denying that any of those things are a problem.

But if you are going to take the view that Wikipedia is promoting eating disorders because there's an article about it, okay, you have a problem with the way you view information in the modern world.