With shift in UK online safety policy, Starmer tells Silicon Valley to ‘bring it on’

A new statement from UK prime minister Keir Starmer outlines his government’s plans to continue developing policies and regulations that make the online world safer for kids – and sees Starmer drop the gloves in the showdown with social media companies over age assurance requirements.

“We will bring new powers that will give us the ability to crack down on the addictive elements of social media, stop the auto-play, the never-ending scrolling, that keeps our children hooked on their screens for hours, and stop kids getting around age limits,” Starmer says. “And if that means a fight with the big social media companies, then bring it on.”

Starmer joins the growing chorus of leaders worldwide who have vowed themselves willing to fight the big money of Big Tech with biometrics and legislation in their quiver – in itself an indication that the cultural tides are turning against social media as we know it. Indeed, he makes it explicit, labeling the plan “a clear shift in how the UK approaches child online safety.”

Consultation to focus on how to help quickly

Titled “Giving children the space to grow,” Starmer’s statement says he is making good on a promise made last month to address parents’ concerns about social media’s harms. It emphasizes speed and agility, noting that the new powers will ensure that the Online Safety Act (OSA) keeps up with rapidly evolving harms.

“At the time of writing the last Substack on this topic, we had just moved quickly to make sure X fixed their AI bot Grok so it could no longer make non-consensual images,” Starmer writes. It was clear then that government intervention is needed to hold social media companies to account and keep young women safe.”

Requests to Parliament for new powers are to be tabled in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. They will be based on the findings of the government’s children’s digital wellbeing consultation, which launches in March 2026. Stated goals include amending online safety and age assurance laws to include AI chatbots like ChatGPT, nudification apps and other tools that facilitate the creation of nonconsensual “intimate images.” The government promises it “will be guided by what parents and children say they need now, not in several years’ time.”

In keeping with the global trend set by Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age act, Starmer says new laws “could include” a minimum age limit for social media platforms, implying the need for biometric age verification or age estimation tools. He expresses confidence that a scheme would be implemented “in a matter of months.”

“I will take the time needed to get this right. I will ensure that the actions we take are the right ones. But once that decision has been made, I will waste no time in getting on with it.”

VPNs also under scrutiny, but civil rights groups object

Starmer’s letter is big on context and low on detail. There are plans to restrict “specific functionalities” that are “detrimental to kids’ wellbeing and keep them hooked to their screens.”

Starmer points to endless scroll or autoplay as an example, but offers nothing more.

The same goes for his promise to limit kids’ access to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), or “make it harder for kids to get around age limits of services or certain functionalities.”

These are relatively wishy-washy statements, considering the sensitivity of the issues at hand The VPN question has already stirred fears that the UK plans to impose age assurance on VPNs, which block a user’s global IP address and skirt local regulatory measures. A statement from Big Brother Watch, a UK civil liberties and privacy rights group, alleges (without a source) that an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill “intends to restrict access to VPNs for under-16s,” and calls the still-theoretical plan “a draconian crackdown on the civil liberties of children and adults alike.”

“The only way such restrictions could be enforced effectively would be for VPN providers to require all users to undergo age assurance measures,” the group says. “Having to provide ID or a biometric face scan to access a VPN utterly defeats the point of a technology designed to enhance privacy online.”

Social media was born in a large-scale privacy violation

It won’t all work; policy stumbles on the curbs of bureaucracy and public sentiment. But Starmer’s lament brings more attention to the larger questions that are currently circling Silicon Valley like buzzards. The PM frames the issue as a matter of social responsibility. “Can we honestly say our children are currently getting the opportunities they deserve when social media is damaging their attention spans, chipping away their confidence, social skills and mental health?”

The PM’s take on how social media has evolved probably echoes most people’s: “When Facebook first launched in 2004, it was a pretty simple concept. Make a profile, post updates that people could look at in the order they were posted, like and comment on what your friends had to say.”

He asserts that “in the past 20+ years, social media has evolved to become something completely different from the simple, stripped-back pages it was in its conception.”

“It has become something that is quietly harming our children.”

That trajectory constitutes the popular narrative: social media was created to make the world a better, more connected place, and has gradually curdled into something unsavory, hazardous and far worse than it was.

That the myth has held for so long is a testament to the power of Silicon Valley’s tycoons to control perception. This version of the story omits the true origin of social media: in the early 2000s, Mark Zuckerberg created a website called “Facemash” that, per Wikipedia, was “designed to evaluate the attractiveness of female Harvard students” and used “ID photos of female undergraduates taken without permission from the university’s online directories.”

A 2010 blog post from the Harvard network verifies this: “Zuckerberg really did start Facemash on a whim in his dorm room late at night and he obtained the content by programmatically scraping Harvard house websites.”

The benevolence of social media is and always has been a lie. From its inception, the technology was imagined and designed as a violation of privacy, and a rejection of consent. In many ways, we are living in the brain of a young Harvard student whose success froze his development at that particular moment, and created a massive biometric privacy violation machine.

81% of kids aged 11-16 use AI chatbots: Vodafone

History repeats itself, time is a flat circle, and as social media was once touted as a bringer of utopias that turned out to be bad for kids, a similar story is unfolding with chatbots. A new campaign from Vodafone looks at how “a lack of safe design and a chatbot’s human-like characteristics are influencing the way children engage with them.”

A release breaks down some numbers: 81 percent of children aged 11 to 16 say they use large language model (LLM) chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude AI. “Almost a third of those who have used an AI chatbot felt it was like a friend, turning to it for advice on difficult situations (24 percent) and to help with worries and anxieties (20 percent),” says Vodafone’s research. Fifty-six percent “feel that AI chatbot interactions can sometimes blur the line between what’s real and what’s not.”

“Experts warn that children and young people talking to chatbots as if they were human puts them at risk both now and in the future, as these ‘relationships’ are not reflective of real, human interactions.”

Vodafone quotes child psychologist Dr. Elly Hanson, who says “it is uncanny how effective AI chatbots can be at mimicking human empathy, personality, and connection. As Vodafone’s research shows, this is leading many children and young people to feel like chatbots are their friends and is interfering with their social development. They need real relationships involving give-and-take, shared experience, diverse perspectives, and actual feelings, not pseudo-relationships designed to keep them hooked for as long as possible.”

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometrics  |  chatbots  |  children  |  Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill  |  data privacy  |  Online Safety Act  |  social media  |  UK age verification  |  VPN (virtual private network)