The stupids are at it again. We’re a couple of weeks away from getting a new Prime Minister and some tool in this rudderless lame duck Government has come up with this enormously vacuous idea. Yes, that’s right, a mandatory curfew for 16-18yo tech users. This policy has been announced almost a full year before the total social media ban comes into force, and three years after the Online Safety Act was introduced. You remember the Online Safety Act? Introduced to stop accessing any/inappropriate (delete as you see fit) content on the Internet? That one? Once again the Government is looking at introducing half-arsed, poorly thought-out legislation which will not treat the cause of the problem, it will only treat a symptom. The cause is, of course, the big tech billionaires and their social media products. But the Government is scared of taking them on and frightened of legislating against the likes of Zuck and Musk.
So here it is, here’s my hard, logical, dispassionate look at the situation we’re all facing. Blaming teenagers for consuming toxic social media, instead of penalising the people who create and distribute toxic social media, is like blaming you for walking along a street covered in dog turds, instead of doing something about the problem of dog turds. We have regulators for social media who seem to do very little regulating. If the problem is social media, the solution is to fix social media. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.