I don’t have kids, well aside from a rambunctious dachshund, so the social media ban (sorry, “delay”) for under 16s that passed into law earlier this year hasn’t really impacted me personally, but I’ve been following the news about it, and similar developments around the world because I see it as a bellwether for future government overreach when it comes to who is allowed to see and do what on the Internet.

Full disclosure to begin with, I am an investor in SafeGen, so I do have some skin in the game, but what I want to write about today isn’t the pro’s and con’s of any particular technology or approach to age assurance. It’s about the law of unintended consequences, and whether anyone has really considered what might happen if, by some miracle, it actually works.

I heard a fascinating anecdote from a parent over the weekend: Their 9 year old daughter, now banished from the likes of Instagram and Snapchat, had formed what was essentially a self contained micro-social network in a WhatsApp group chat with her friends from school. The girls in this group are apparently behaving like TikTok influencers, posting videos to the group as they wake up talking about their spooky dreams or how good a night’s sleep they had. This goes on all day, right up until the girls go to bed - or as happened in the case of this young lady, until her phone is taken off her by her parents after 7pm.

Setting aside for a moment how bonkers it is that 9 year olds are going to such lengths to replicate the experience of participating in social media, let me break down what this means from a socio-technical perspective: Children have moved their online activity away from relatively open and centrally observable social media platforms to private, end-to-end encrypted, peer-to-peer chat apps which can be locked with a PIN or biometric to stop parents from prying when their child leaves their phone unattended.

In other words, much like the predators these laws are supposedly intended to protect them from, the kids have “gone underground” so they can keep doing the same things they were doing, but away from the prying eyes of the authorities. Ironically, the government has only succeeded in driving kids towards the very online spaces and channels where predators prefer to lurk. Even before the ban, child predators had demonstrated a preference to lure kids away from the big platforms to chat with them privately via alternative apps where prying eyes couldn’t spy on them.

When I heard this, my first thought was to wonder how all the parents who were supposedly clamouring for the government to “do something” about child social media addiction and the looming spectre of online child predators felt, now that their parental responsibilities had been made exponentially more difficult as a result of the government’s ham-fisted response. Their children, almost certainly more technologically literate than they are, have come up with new and innovative ways to avoid interference and supervision of their online activities. Who could have possibly predicted this would happen?

Almost immediately I realised it was pointless to hope that they now realised the folly of demanding that the government swing the ban hammer because it was easier than tackling the real underlying problems related to social media use by young people. I suspect that the majority of parents don’t even know this is happening. For those not savvy enough to catch onto this new trend, the social media problem likely appears to be solved. Out of sight, out of mind…

Enter the Law of Unintended Consequences: not only have kids found ways to make their online activity harder to for parents, teachers, and basically anyone to keep tabs on; the government has inadvertently created a situation where many parents will feel like they no longer have to pay attention because as far as they can tell, the problem has gone away. Meanwhile, kids feel like they have to hide their online activity and resort to communicating via channels that online predators already prefer.

Which brings me to the real reason for the social media ban. Call me cynical, but you’d have to be pretty naive to believe it was ever really about protecting children. I think the government is playing a much longer game. They didn’t just predict turn of events, they have been counting on it. When the inevitable cries of desperate parents unable to protect their babies from the horrors of online predators come, they’ll give the government perfect political cover to reach for something they have long coveted, but so far been unable to make happen…

Yes, I’m talking about “lawful access” to encrypted communications. OR as everyone who knows anything at all about encryption calls it: government mandated backdoors.

Here’s how I see this playing out: soon, the fact kids are using messaging apps to skirt the social media ban will make it into the media. Obviously, the government can’t just ban kids from using messaging apps because parents use them to talk to their kids. So instead, the government will respond by saying they can’t do anything about it because of end-to-end encryption. This will be rapidly followed by wild accusations and confected moral outrage that companies which provide end-to-end encrypted messaging are putting children at risk, enabling terrorism, and conspiring to put 5G into the water supply.

After sufficient community sympathy for the government’s position is manufactured, a bill will be put forth that mandates any entity that distributes a chat app must provide a mechanism for law enforcement to access to chat content somehow. Like the social media ban legislation, the bill won’t specify how this capability should be implemented, or even acknowledge the technological and mathematical impossibility of it. Instead, it will frame the method of implementation as a problem for the platform operators to solve, neatly absolving the government of any responsibility for bad implementations and the inevitable data breaches which will follow.

Much like TOLA and the telco metadata retention laws before it, this bill will sail through parliament, regardless of any criticism or amendments proposed by minor parties, or even findings and recommendations of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, because no one really wants to lose political skin arguing against a law advertised as being for child protection…. and ultimately because regardless of who is in government, they all want this power.

Getting back to the issues of the social media ban and age assurance in general, there are numerous questions which remain unanswered. Chief among them: what problem(s) are we really trying to solve here, and why is banning or restricting access to “problematic” things always the first solution we reach for as a society? Why is more surveillance always the first (and typically only) solution offered by the government?

Taking a step back from the technology, the government has framed social media use by children as an equivalent harm to under age smoking and drinking. I won’t pretend to know the first thing about child psychology, but even to my uneducated mind, that seems like a ridiculous proposition. Can social media have a negative impact on young people? Absolutely, but that all comes down to how it is used. I think it’s fair to say that it also has the potential to have a fabulously positive impact under the right circumstances. By contrast, I don’t think anyone would argue that smoking might be positive for children under any circumstances at all.

What about underage drinking? That’s an interesting question, because I feel like it demonstrates the nuance and complexities of the social media issue as well. At a macro level, we’ve agreed as a society that under age drinking is bad, but in private most people would acknowledge it’s just a part of growing up and in some ways, a sort of right of passage. Parents are often happy to make their own judgement calls about how and when to introduce their kids to alcohol, preferring to have some agency and oversight about how it happens than leave it to peer pressure in a dark car park somewhere far away from adult supervision…

I see social media use through a similar lens: it will be far better for young people in the long run if they are introduced to it in a controlled and supervised way, rather than just saying “you can’t do this” until they turn 16, then unleashing them onto platforms like Reddit and X with none of the skills required to navigate the torrid cesspools they have become.

Ultimately, I think the real underlying problem parents face with social media, and most aspects of their kids growing up, is that they don’t have time to be parents. At some point, society accepted that it was reasonable for both parents to need full time jobs just to pay their mortgage and put food on the table, and the kids would have to sort themselves out. Governments around the world, in their never ending quest to drive economic growth, have forced us all into a position where all anyone has time for is working all day and then coming home to do more work. Is it any wonder that the social response is to demand that the government take over responsibility for all the things we don’t have time for any more as a result?

Like raising your own kids.