I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this. The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home. There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered. What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business. Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not. This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy. That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids. What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes. Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming? No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.

Maurice Glasman backs Al Carns for PM on @TimesRadio

My first instinct was to support the UK’s social media ban for under 16s. Protecting children from grooming, exploitation and harmful content seems like common sense. But I’m seeing a lot of opposition to it, so I’m genuinely curious as to why? One thing making me second guess is that platforms like bluesky are exempt, while at the same time there’s a push to let 16 year olds vote. To me that looks less like child protection and more like controlling where young people get their information. Interested to hear other perspectives.

🚨 NEW: Under-16s in the UK will be banned from the following 10 social media apps TikTok YouTube Snapchat Instagram X Reddit Facebook Twitch Kick Threads

BBC: “What was your screen time?” Student: “Nine hours.” BBC: “You’re gong to have a lot more time to fill. What will you do?” Student: “Stare at a wall.”

Serious concerns have been raised over a potential data breach involving Reform Wales after individuals subscribed to a Welsh Conservative Party mailing list began receiving press releases from the party's Senedd group ✍️Emily Price nation.cymru/news/reform-wal…

Russia was behind arson attacks targeting UK PM Keir Starmer, BBC reveals bbc.in/3Q3lOy1

The Trump administration has announced they'll need to spend an estimated $1 billion to combat the New World Screwworm.