I’ll set aside what this policy is obviously actually about - the erosion of online anonymity and building the quiet infrastructure for silencing (and criminalising) dissent - and play ball by pretending it’s about child protection.
If you want to effectively safeguard children online (speaking as a former safeguarding practitioner among other things - though you don’t need to have any professional experience to see how catastrophically bad a policy this is), this is categorically the wrong approach.
Banning children from social media will not make them safer; it will make them invisible. They will inevitably find their way around the ban - in Australia, seven in ten children retained active accounts after the ban came into force - except now they will do so covertly, without parental oversight, while parents assume that their job has been outsourced to the state and that their child(ren) is not online and thus doesn’t require supervision.
The net effect is less supervision, not more, and a significantly more dangerous online environment for the very children the policy claims to protect.
This is basic stuff. That those who govern us do not understand second and third-order consequences is concerning - and I’m not referring to people who fully understand what is happening here (e.g. the Prime Minister), but instead the moronic people like the former Technology Secretary of State who was on GB News (The Late Show Live) just now who don’t seem to realise that kids are so much more tech savvy than them, and the nagging harridans and moronic Mumsnet cheerleaders.
Your average Gen Alpha kid will figure out a workaround relatively quickly and will soon be surfing the web unregulated and unsupervised. Congrats to everyone who advocated for this and those who continue to cheer it on. You are, with respect, idiots.
(And, again, this isn’t about protecting the kids at all, but instead about controlling adults’ internet usage).
If you outlaw social media for kids, parents will stop monitoring their online activity completely. But the kids - who are far more tech savvy - will just find a workaround (it takes 1 min to download a free VPN) and end up using social media *totally unregulated unsupervised*.