Politics Archives

Journeys through online harms

X.AI – the company was-trillionaireElon Musk built in 2025 by smashing together X (the former Twitter) and xAI, which he founded in 2023 – is suing the state of Minnesota, claiming that its new law banning access to nudification technology violates the First Amendment. X.AI, which SpaceX swallowed early this year, argues that it’s already stopping this sort of thing and that the law is overbroad and will block constitutionally protected speech. At Techdirt, Mike Masnick argues the law is genuinely badly drafted.

I saw this story while reading The Chatbot Trap: How Digital Friends Can Become Life-Threatening, by Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere, Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, by Adele Zeynep Walton, and Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back, by Beeban Kidron. In the first, a Belgian software engineer and AI expert discovers the suicide-inducing tendencies of chatbots, investigates how they work, and builds an organization to push for regulation. In the second, a Zoomer who lost her sister following disturbing online interaction embraces a new balance between digital media and human connections. In the third, a member of Britain’s House of Lords journeys from filmmaker to tireless campaigner for child safety online. All three love technology and its benefits but oppose the business models and individuals who are deciding the direction of travel.

De Ketelaere’s book begins with an email: someone who saw her speak about AI wants help “to assert my rights as a human being” after her conversations with a chatbot turned disturbing – and after reading media stories connecting chatbot use to cases of suicide. De Ketelaere ends with ideas about regulation and ways to recognize the signs of an unhealthy situation.

At this year’s Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, De Ketelaere warned of the danger of abruptly closing off intimate connections with bots because of the traumatic loss for the people concerned. As she says, even minor tweaks that favor the owning company’s business interests can undermine the relationships users experience.

De Ketelaere’s book is particularly strong in clearly describing the technical inner workings of these chatbots, revealed to her by careful study of the chatbot conversations her contacts supply. Few writing on this topic have presented such careful detail so readably.

Walton’s book begins with loss, and goes on to outline what she’s learned about the services her sister used and her own experiences as part of the generation who adopted and obsessed over Instagram as teens. Following chapters on social media and algorithms, she goes considers the impact of technology design on workers’ rights, individuals, and society more broadly through what she calls the “endless stream of content vomit”. Following some regulatory recommendations – consider social media addiction a public health issue, amend the Suicide Act 1961 to make companies liable, adopt safety by design, and make companies pay for the harms they cause – she concludes by considering how to reshape our relationship with technology so it serves us but does not dominate our lives.

In 2011, Charles Arthur‘s Social Warming argued that social media harms continue because no one chooses to stop them. Walton – like De Ketelaere and Kidron – angrily blames uncaring companies. It’s hard to disagree, although I take issue with Walton’s calling Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act “archaic”; granted, it was not written for today’s algorithmic feeds, but there would be no content moderation without it.

Kidron is well-known as a campaigner for children’s online safety. Yet all along she has repeatedly stressed that the privacy, autonomy, and protection children deserve from data grabs and online exploitation should be available to all of us.

Appointed to the House of Lords as a crossbench peer in 2012, Kidron’s interest began with seeing her 15-year-old daughter and three friends together focused solely on their own phones. Her subsequent investigation became her 2013 documentary InRealLife and inspired her concurrent creation of the 5Rights Foundation. The film is notable for the extraordinary trust and confidence she builds with the many young people she interviews; listening to them was crucial.

Her book is long and loaded with detail on her efforts and frustrations in working on legislation and amendments (making the book’s lack of an index infuriating). Disabused of the hope that a film would do the job, she travels the world, pushing everyone from Nobel Laureates to Silicon Valley CEOs to politicians to popes (plural) to take Internet harms seriously. She explains well the lobbyists’ playbook as she hopes for the industry’s “tobacco moment”. Late on, Oprah Winfrey links the lack of change to the silence after her show on sexual abuse, saying that parents don’t believe it will happen to their child, and they don’t want the fear. In response, Kidron attempts to show a positive vision, including personal changes to reclaim our lives.

Kidron’s tale largely ignores civil society other than the Campaign for Countering Digital Hate and Max Schrems. Yet she has more in common with groups like ORG than she may realize: many strange bedfellows are converging on digital sovereignty to enable resistance against the terms dictated by a distant, self-interested country.

Illustrations: Children playing, by Hubert-François Gravelot, 1760-1761 (via Smithsonian).

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Escaping the sandbox

This week, France became the first European country to pass a social media ban. Under-15s will be blocked from opening new accounts on social media from September, and banned entirely from January 2027. As the BBC notes, implementation will require everyone in France to prove they are over 15 to use social media. Other European countries may follow.

At the New York Times, Mark Landler reports that similar laws are in progress in Canada, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. The EU is considering a bloc-wide law. The UK announced a ban to begin in 2027 last month and published a fact sheet last week – unless new prime minister Andy Burnham changes tack, as he has by canceling digital IDs.

At Le Monde, Florian Reynaud traces the origins of this whole idea of social media bans to a 2019 article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf. In it, Friedersdorf proposed not only a ban on social media sites for kids but a separate kid-friendly “Internet” with services designed just for them (this part was actually not a new idea).

A fundamental problem, no matter what restrictions or sandboxes you want to create, is that social media bans require sites to determine who’s allowed in and who isn’t. So, no social media ban without age verification, which the UK had already introduced.

Worth noting: at the Guardian, Amelia Gentleman interviews Candice Odgers, who has concluded from *talking to kids* that social media bans will make teens’ problems worse, not better. At The Conversation, Andy Phippen, who also listens to children as well as parents, is equally dubious.

Because Australia was first, everyone looks at its results. The BBC reported in April, four months after Australia’s social media ban began, that 61% of 12 to 15-year-olds still had access to one or more accounts and that a little over half of those who had used social media before the ban believed the ban was making no difference to their online safety. In July, researchers found their consumption of news had dropped. The Independent offered uncertainty. A few weeks ago, at the Guardian Anna Bawden reported that a newer study from the University of Newcastle published in the British Medical Journal finds that 85% of Australian 12 to 17-year-olds are still using social media, more than half of them through their own accounts.

Numbers are easier to assess than emotional states, which means that whether the bans “work” is more easily and immediately measured by how many kids evade the ban – and this in turn means next steps will inevitably be aimed at shrinking that number without waiting the years necessary to assess the real results.

France is already on it, aiming to restrict VPNs, as Skye Jacobs reports at Techspot. At Techdirt, Mike Masnick warns that Australia is, too. And so is the EU, to prevent kids from bypassing its easily hacked age verification app.

For now, the UK is holding out. Last week, the UK’s then-minister for online safety, Kanishka Narayan, told BBC Breakfast News that the government has decided against banning VPNs since they have many privacy and security uses. This was later confirmed in writing by then-technology secretary Liz Kendall. In the week since, Kendall’s department has been abolished, and Narayan has been made the UK’s first minister for artificial intelligence. So we’ll see if at least that amount of sense continues to prevail.

***

Much excitement this week when OpenAI announced that in a cybersecurity test an unreleased model broke out of its sandbox and mounted a cyber attack on Hugging Face, a community for sharing machine learning models and datasets. At his blog, Simon Willison analyzes what happened in more detail.

If you’ve read Janelle Shane’s book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, Willison’s explanation makes perfect sense. Shane documents many cases in which AI software, given a task, takes “shortcuts”. Because computers and software are literal (paperclip maximizers, these shortcuts are sometimes surprising to humans. Here, OpenAI removed the guardrails, locked the model in a sandbox, and told it to solve a bunch of benchmark problems. The model “cheated” – that is, instead of working directly on the problems, it found a vulnerability in the sandbox that let it access the public Internet, and attacked Hugging Face as a likely source of the problems’ solutions. If it were a new-model car kept in a locked parking lot that turned itself on, crashed through the barriers, and drove into a house across the street, it wouldn’t seem so mystical; we’d expect the company to revamp the car’s electrical system, strengthen the barriers, and pay for the damage.

Willison goes on to argue that a key issue is asymmetry of knowledge – that is, that the guardrails that protect us from “our” AI software don’t apply elsewhere, so blocks on Chinese AIs prevent us for finding the vulnerabilities in our own software and services that they can. At last, a sensible reason for caring if another country is “winning the AI race” (whatever that really means).

Illustrations: Children swimming in the summer, by Japanese artist Ando Hiroshige, 1797-1858 (via Smithsonian collection.

Also this week: The Plutopia podcast talks with Rob van Eijk on digital sovereignty, AI, and privacy in the EU.

Banned

Some policies are popular until people examine the details. This may be happening with social media bans like the one UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced this week. It will prohibit under-16s from using the main social media platforms or livestreaming, ban under-18s from using “romantic simulation” chatbots, and limit strangers’ ability to contact under-16s via direct messaging on gaming platforms. More detail will come in July; the government will also consider imposing a nightly curfew and requiring breaks in scrolling for under-18s. As so often, it’s possible to support the goals of policy proposals while disagreeing with the proposals themselves.

The BBC reports that 90% of the parents who responded to the recent consultation backed the ban (although the panel survey report is less clear-cut). Yet Ofcom’s May 2026 report shows more nuance: more than half of parents agree that the benefits of being online outweigh the risks. Narrowing that to social media use, 46% of parents still think the benefits outweigh the risks, dropping to 33% for parents of eight to 12-year-olds.

The move has been met with some skepticism from Cambridge psychologists, and even from some veteran child safety campaigners such as Jim Gamble.

The BBC reports that Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old whose suicide in 2017 was attributed to viewing harmful content online, has called the ban a blunt instrument that will merely cause more problems. Russell argues for more thought, less haste.

At his blog, Lewis Goodall connects the haste to Starmer’s government’s precarity, which he thinks may doom the policy despite widespread concern about children online. Goodall, too, isn’t sure it’s the right policy. As we’ve also noted here before, this government is simultaneously pushing to lower the voting age to 16. At ConservativeHome, John Oxley points out the absurdity of banning these new voters from accessing social media to look up candidates’ policies. The teens the Guardian interviewed varied in their views.

It’s also true that today’s teens have less independence and fewer options for offline socializing than older generations did. As Alec Muffett writes on Bluesky, you cannot force 2020s children into 1980s childhoods because so much infrastructure is gone. When you take away online interaction, what’s left?

The Open Rights Group recaps 13 years of online child safety measures, beginning with ISP and mobile network filters in 2013 and ending with this week’s announcements. ORG argues that taking a systems view shows that these escalating online safety measures leave the underlying problem untouched: the feedback loop that ought to drive users away when they encounter awful content is broken.

Because Australia was the first country to implement a social media ban, it’s the model everyone looks at. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the ban “works”, based on how well it’s keeping teens off social media. A survey of Australian parents found that two-thirds of teens still have social media accounts. Other research says that of those who’ve lost their accounts, half say the ban limits their access to news.

But is that what we should mean by “work”? By that standard, testing someone for allergies by eliminating specific foods would “work” if the person didn’t consume them. But what we want to know is whether the person is actually allergic to those foods, or, by analogy, whether the ban remediates the harms – depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues – that politicians claim to be worried about. A social media ban sounds simple; addressing climate change, the state of the economy, the cost of education, and the fear that there will be no jobs is hard.

ORG contends that enabling people to move between social networks at will, improving competition, and breaking up the platforms would do more to counter online harms than the present approach. This week also provided an example of how not to do this.

The newly launched, fully European social network “W Social” is based on the AT protocol that powers Bluesky, and limited to identified humans. Per Euronews, W Social is a privately owned Swedish startup whose investors are other European companies. In order to apply for an account, you must first provide to W Identity, a separate entity, your name, date of birth, phone number, address, passport, and photo. You then give permission to W Identity to give W Social your account number, date of birth, and passport country. You can only have one account.

Although Anna Zeiter, the Swiss CEO of W, which is a subsidiary of Sweden-based climate action platform We Don’t Have Time, is described as a “privacy expert”, the amount and sensitivity of the information being demanded is disproportionate, especially as there is barely any declining, especially among young people. What if they created a ban and nobody came?

Illustrations: Children swimming in the summer, by Japanese artist Ando Hiroshige, 1797-1858 (via Smithsonian collection.

Technology distinguishable from magic

This week, a regional court in Munich issued what may be a landmark decision: it ruled that Google is liable for the content of its “AI Overviews”. The court was careful to distinguish between these, which Google’s algorithms generate, and search results, which link to content on third-party websites Google does not control. In other words, Google owns its own mistakes. The court awarded 80% of costs to the plaintiffs, two Munich-based publishers who claimed that the company spread damaging false information about them by linking them to scams in these AI-generated summaries.

As Max Bastian writes at Decoder, the ruling could set precedents for other companies. Google has yet to comment, but presumably will appeal. Away from AI is certainly not the direction the company wants to go; it’s spent the last couple of years building generative AI more and more deeply into its search, hoping to keep users locked in instead of chasing off to other sites. (Ironically, bouncing users off to other sites was the reason Yahoo refused to buy it in 1998, when the received business model was keeping users on your own site as long as possible.)

Google tried to argue that users should do their own fact-checking. But, as the court seems to have understood, where search results send you to the source page, AI Overviews look complete and don’t always offer sourcing to check. A study conducted for the New York Times found in an analysis of more than 4,000 searches that AI Overviews produced using the Gemini 2 model were accurate 85% of the time, rising to 91% when using Gemini 3 – about average for these systems. Enter the Law of Truly Large Numbers: 91% only sounds pretty good until you multiply the remaining 9% by billions to calculate the millions of wrong answers being disseminated every single day. Oumi, the startup that performed the analysis, found the AI Overviews included sources such as Facebook and Reddit posts, drew incorrect information even from authoritative sources, and are prone to manipulation. The article notes that Google disputes the analysis, saying that the benchmarks were developed by OpenAI and themselves contain inaccuracies.

The Munich court ordered Google to stop repeating the claims about the publishers, and awarded the publishers 80% of costs. It also rejected Google’s attempt to frame the issue as one of freedom of speech, calling the AI Overviews, “above all an expression of Google’s business activities”.

One reason the judge’s ruling is so significant is that most approaches for dealing with misinformation that have been mooted to date are at human, instead of computer, scale. Fact-checking, for example, while valuable, moves very, very slowly, one claim at a time. If the ruling stands, it will help tackle this type of misinformation at source.

***

Politicians like to talk as if the moon they want is available if the industry would just stop being obstructive. With AI’s capabilities in headlines everywhere, they are now demanding that phones should block children from taking, viewing, or sharing nude photos. This is the policy Keir Starmer announced this week in a speech, based on claims from the British company SafetoNet. The government has since provided more detail. Mic Wright has a round-up of press reactions. At the Daily Telegraph, Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo provides a strong civil liberties objection.

So far, neither Apple nor Google has said much. At New Scientist, Chris Stokel-Walker notes that both companies already have some controls in place, but spreading them through third-party apps poses challenges, especially as some phones’ operating systems aren’t recent enough to have the more sophisticated parental controls in the first place.

The moral may be: if you tell people your technology is magic, don’t be surprised when they expect it to *be* magic.

***

This week I had to verify my identity for Companies House. This is supposed to be a straightforward matter of creating a Gov One login, entering some details of a government-issued ID, and uploading a photo. The website was discontented: it couldn’t find my address, (is my century-old home too old to be in the database?), and didn’t accept the details I entered. Eventually, it offered two alternatives: use a phone app, or present myself in person at a preselected post office.

The app balked. It couldn’t open its links even though I’d authorized it. So, in this year of two thousand and twenty-six I got on a train to go to the nearest remaining post office that could perform the necessary rituals to show them first a QR code to access my application and then the ID, whose information is digitally held but had to be retyped on the post office tablet, and finally pose for a photo for the system – not the post office human – to compare and match. Some of those steps took several tries to mollify the system. Naturally, they don’t report whether you’ve passed until after you’ve gone home.

These are the people who want to create a digital ID infrastructure. I can only assume that if they ever get that system up and running actually using it will involve faxing things because by then all the post offices will be gone.

Illustrations: “The Magic Lantern”, by Auguste Edouart, circa 1835 (via The Met); at one time we thought that technology was magic.

Also this week:
At the Plutopia podcast, we talk to about her new book, Bad Influence.
The TechGrumps podcast episode, 3.41: The KardashElons of AI.

The Silicon Valley chronicles

We should have seen this coming. At Platformer, Casey Newton reports that Meta has discussed pulling funding for the Oversight Board after 2028 after already reducing it “significantly” this year. Who needs fripperies like independent governance after reporting billions of losses in its Reality Labs unit, the bit responsible for the seemingly now-abandoned metaverse, the smartglasses, and, of course, AI? Per Newton, there are ongoing discussions about continuing the Oversight Board somehow, perhaps by opening it up to adjudicate for other platforms.

The reality is the Oversight Board’s moment has probably passed. In 2018, creating it was an effective public relations response to a series of scandalous revelations, beginning in 2017 with Carole Cadwalladr‘s work exposing Cambridge Analytica‘s use of Facebook to collect personal data to target political advertising. Its biggest moment was probably in January 2021, when the Oversight Board backed Facebook‘s decision to ban then-“former guy” Donald Trump for two years following the January 6 insurrection. Twitter banned him, too, and there was a brief crackdown on postings calling for violence. Much public criticism followed from whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen and Sarah Wynn Williams (2025), and the Netflix documentary The Great Hack..

Today, though,the big technology companies seem not to care. Maybe they will again if usage shrinks enough – the BBC reports an Ofcom study showing that UK adults are actively posting 61% less than last year. But defunding the Oversight Board seems consistent with the general decline of content moderation on Facebook and elsewhere. Neither fines, nor spreading age verification laws, nor other constraints can be remedied by funding an Oversight Board that is already rarely mentioned.

Besides, the years since 2018 have seen the “billionaire class” take a hard turn to the libertarian right; they show little inclination to be constrained personally or corporately by national laws or governments.

In a January 2025 interview, Netscape creator and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen provided this explanation: US Democrats “broke the deal”. That is, Silicon Valley supported Democrats as long as they left technology companies free of regulation. (Democrats might reply that they were responding on behalf of the public to changes in Silicon Valley companies’ behavior.)

In addition, Connie Loizos reports at TechCrunch that the billionaires who signed Warren Buffett’s and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge would now like it forgotten. At Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson fears most Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey’s enthusiasm for incorporating AI and robotics into more and bigger weapons. Anduril was founding in 2017, the year before Google employees petitioned the company to exit its contract with Project Maven, the Pentagon’s effort to harness machine learning and automatic targeting. By 2021, Tom Simonite was reporting at Wired that Google was bidding on military contracts. A few weeks back, at the Financial Times, Jemima Kelly called Silicon Valley billionaires “enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb”, citing a recent podcast interview in which Andreessen said he never engages in introspection.

Available to link all this together is Jacob Silverman’s new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Musk is not the sole focus of Silverman’s “guided tour through America’s self-designated innovator class” and its resentment of government and power to change it. Much of the book, which Silverman began researching in 2023, focuses on other high-dollar funders such as David Sacks and DOGE co-mastermind Vivek Ramaraswamy (whom Silverman introduces as the boss who fired him from an early job), as well as members of the “Paypal Mafia” including Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Silverman also includes chapters on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Saudi Arabia’s growing connections to Silicon Valley, the cryptocurrency boom, the fight over TikTok’s US presence, a so-far failed plan to take over California’s Solano County, Sam Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall, and the choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. The book ends with the donors’ success – that is, Trump’s election in 2024.

With Gilded Rage, Silverman revives a formerly niche publishing subgenre , which documented the beginnings of this shift. First on the scene in the US, to the best of my knowledge, was northern California native Paulina Borsook with a 1996 essay for Mother Jones, Cyberselfish. In it, and in the subsequent 2000 book, she laid out Silicon Valley’s refusal to recognize the government assistance and military funding that enabled its wealth and growth. To Borsook, who described herself in the 1998 book Wired Women as the “token hippie feminist writing for Wired“, Silicon Valley’s turn to the right and distaste for government were already visible even then. In November, David Streitfeld profiled Borsook at the New York Times and noted the price she paid for her contrarian view.

In a 1995 essay The Californian Ideology, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron pushed Europe to take a different path.

Silverman’s most recent predecessor is Douglas Rushkoff’s 2022 skewing of “The Mindset” in Survival of the Richest. In Rushkoff’s telling, these high-wealth individuals are planning their safety and/or escape during and after “the incident” – that is, whatever catastrophe is going to wipe us all out.

So Silverman is less documenting a shift than he is describing an outcome: a political wave whose emergence into the mainstream only seems sudden.

Illustrations: Political cartoon from 1904, showing Standard Oil’s stranglehold on US industry (via Wikimedia).

Also this week:
At Plutopia, we interview Paulina Borsook.

Power games

UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s desire to bring in a UK digital ID is awake again with the announcement that the government plans to make the IDs available for “a handful of uses” before the next general election, due by 2029, . The requisite consultation closes May 5.

At Computer Weekly, Lis Evanstad adds a summary and detail about the consultation. Government by app! What could possibly go wrong?

Among other new information in the consultation: the age for being able to get a digital ID could drop below 18, perhaps even to issuance at birth. There might be a single unique identifier to enable linking data throughout government systems. Darren Jones, the prime minister’s chief secretary, talks smoother access to government services and the ability to share only the piece of data that’s needed for a specific purpose, but not about the risks of tying everything to a single identifier whose compromise can reverberate throughout your life.

In his Guardian piece, Stacey quotes Jones, who positions the digital ID as a way to improve fairness in access to government services, which he says accrue disproportionately to “pushy” people with time, patience, and energy.

This sounds good until you read Government Digital Service co-founder Tom Loosemore‘s blog, where he notes that creating that sort of stonewalling bureaucracy is often a deliberate strategy to manage demand. Loosemore argues that agentic AI will force an end to this strategy because agents will have unlimited patience and “reduce the cost to citizens of appeals, challenges, and calculations etc to near-zero”. Instead of having to manually dig through financial records, Loosemore finds in an experiment that an AI agent can scan the documents, find the information, and present only the data required to establish the citizen’s entitlement to benefits.

He believes AI agents will also bring a new level of transparency (and perhaps “pushiness”): “AI Agents will always dig out that 93 page PDF of guidance hidden.” Governments, he writes, will be forced to “clarify and tighten policies & processes, with all the painful political trade-offs therein”.

Or: will budget-protecting governments adopt their own agentic AIs to move and re-bury the stuff they don’t want applicants to find and recalibrate their requirements to make them resistant to automation? Seems just as likely, really.

While all that was going on, significant votes took place on the future of access to online content. On Tuesday, Jennifer McKiernan reports at the BBC, MPs rejected the proposed social media for under-16s, which would have been added to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill. Instead, the government is continuing to collect information from the consultation it launched on March 2, which closes on May 26.

Some MPs seem to have been persuaded by the argument – mooted by, among others, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – that banning children from social media will simply push them to find darker, less visible unregulated online spaces with less in the way of protection or moderation. The Commons did, however, support a government proposal to give the relevant ministers greater powers to restrict or ban children’s access to social media services and chatbots, limit their use of VPNs, and change the “age of digital consent”. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill now goes back to the Lords for more discussion. .

As an unelected body, in recent years the House of Lords has often been a damper on hastily-passed legislation in response to political trends, but here they’re leading. The social media ban passed there. This week, as Dev Kundaliya reports at Computing. the Lords voted on two amendments, one to the Crime and Policing bill, the other to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill. At the Online Safety Act Network blog, University of Essex professor Lorna Woods explains these in detail. The first would enable the government to amend the Online Safety Act to “minimize or mitigate the risks of harm to individuals” from illegal AI-generated content. The second would give the government latitude to change the age of consent.

Woods’ main point is the extreme power being given the government here to bypass Parliament, calling the clauses Henry VIII powers – that is, giving the government the power to change or repeal an Act of Parliament without consulting Parliament. The government’s official justification is to give the government greater flexibility to adapt on the fly to new technologies and online harms. Or to bar access to stuff it doesn’t like, presumably.

The Open Rights Group agrees, calling the plan powers to restrict the entire Internet. ORG also cites a March 0 open letter from 400 scientists and calls for a moratorium on age assurance to learn more about the technological hazards and social impact and for adopting alternative measures in the meantime, such as regulating algorithmic manipulation and providing parents with support.

At DefendDigitalMe, Jen Persson points out that the books already contain laws enabling considerable digital control of children; surveillance, she writes, is being “dressed as ‘safety'”. None of this, she writes, is compatible with children’s *rights*, which don’t seem to get much of a look-in.

Illustrations: Henry VIII, as painted by Hans Holbein the Younger (via Wikimedia.

Also this week: TechGrumps 3.38, The Bettification of Everything.

In search of the future Internet

“What kind of Internet do you want [him] to inherit?” “Him” was then measuring his age in weeks.

“Not *this* Internet.”

Now, when said son has grown to measure his life in months, my friend and I are no closer to a positive vision. But notably many more people seem to be asking the same kind of question.

In the last week I’ve been to two meetings convened to pull together a cross-section of activists, policy wonks, and techies to talk about building movements to push back against the spread of technological control. The goals of these groups, like my friend’s and mine remain fuzzy, but they reflect a widespread growing alarm about AI, US entanglement, and our other technological ills.

“When did the future stop being something we plan for and become something done to us?” a friend asked about five years ago. That sense of being held hostage by the inevitability narrative is there, too, in a jumble including job loss, the evils of capitalism, the embedding of companies like Palantir in the health service and soon in policing, the speed of change, widespread loneliness, sustainability, and existential threats. So the overall feel has been part-Occupy, part consciousness-raising session.

Those who did have visions to propose often seemed to be describing things that already exist: trusted, authoritative content (the BBC, Wikipedia); ending capitalism in favor of shared ownership and distributed power (“there’s always someone reinventing communism,” the person next to me muttered), and recreating the impossible dream of micropayments.

One meeting polled us with a list of concerns about AI and asked us to pick the most important. The winner, by far, was “consolidation of power”. This speaks to a wider movement than merely opposing AI or resisting the encroachment of the worst technology surveillance practices into daily life.

Similar discussions have been growing for at least a couple of years. At The Register, long-time open source advocate Liam Proven writes after attending the Open Source Policy Summit that Europe is reassessing its technological reliance on US IT services, which offers the potential for a US president to order disconnection. The lack of European billion-dollar technology companies leads people to forget the technology invented here that instead embraced openness: the web, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Open StreetMap, the Fediverse.

It’s a little alarming, however, that all of this discussion hovers at the application layer. Old-timers who’ve watched the Internet build up understand that underneath the social media and smartphones lies the physical layer, the infrastructure that is also condolidated and controlled: chips, cables, wireless spectrum. For younger folks, those elements are near-invisible; their adult lives have been dominated by concerns about data. Yet in the last year we’ve been warned of sabotage to undersea cables and chip shortages. There’s more general recognition of the issues surrounding data centers’ demand for power and water.

Even so, there’s a good amount of recognition that all the strands of our present polycrisis are intertwined – see for example the mission statement at Germany’s Cables of Resistance. A broader group, building on the 2024 conference convened by Cristina Caffarra, who called out policy makers at CPDP 2024 for ignoring physical infrastructure, is working on a EuroStack to provide a European cloud alternative.

At the political layer, we have Dutch News reporting that Dutch MPs are pushing their government to move away from depending on US technology companies to provide essential infrastructure. In the UK, LibDem and Green MPs are calling on the government to reconsider its contracts with Palantir.

A group called Pull the Plug will lead a “march against the machines” in London on February 28 to demand the UK government create citizens’ assemblies and implement their decisions on AI.

It feels like change is gathering here. In the US, the future still looks much like the past. In a blog post this week, here is Anthropic, presumably responding to OpenAI’s plan to add advertising to ChatGPT:

But including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking…We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests. So we’ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see “sponsored” links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.

Compare and contrast to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their 1998 Google-founding paper:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users…we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

No wonder Anthropic adds this caution: “Should we need to revisit this approach, we’ll be transparent about our reasons for doing so.” Translation: we may need the money.” Of course they’ll frame it as serving the customer better.

Illustrations: (One of) the first Internet ad, for AT&T, on HotWired (via The Internet History Podcast.

Also this week:
At the Plutopia podcast we talk to science fiction writer Ken MacLeod.

In search of causality

The debates over children’s use of social media, screens, and phones continue, exacerbated in the UK by ongoing Parliamentary scrutiny of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill and continuing disgust over Grok‘s sexualized image generation. Robert Booth reports at the Guardian that the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Grok AI generated 3 million sexualized images in under two weeks and that a third of them are still viewable on X. In that case, X and Grok appear to be a more general problem than children’s access.

We continue to need better evidence establishing causality or its absence. This week, researchers from the Bradford Centre for Health Data Science (led by Dan Lewer) and the University of Cambridge (led by Amy Orben) announced a six-week trial that will attempt to find the actual impact on teens of limiting – not ending – social media access. The BBC reports, that the trial will split 4,000 Bradford secondary school pupils into two groups, One will download an app hat turns off access to services like TikTok and Snapchat from 9pm to 7am and limits use at other times to a “daily budget”. The restrictions won’t include WhatsApp, which the researchers recognize is central to many family groups. The other half will go on using social media as before.

The researchers will compare the two groups by assessing their’ levels of anxiety, depression, sleep, bullying, and time spent with friends and family.

In earlier research, Orben developed a framework for data donation, which allows teens to understand their own use of social media. Another forthcoming study, Youth Perspectives on Social Media Harms: A Large-Scale Micro-Narrative Study, collects 901 first-person tales from 18- to 22-year-olds in the UK. From these Orben’s group derive four types of harm: harms from other people’s behavior, personal harmful behavior evoked by social media, harms related to the content they encounter, and harms related to platform features. In the first category they include bullying and scams; in the second, compulsive use and social comparison; in the third, graphic material; and in the fourth, algorithmic manipulation. They also note the study’s limitations. A longer-term or differently-timed study might show different effects – during the study period the 2024 US presidential election took place. The teens’ stories don’t establish causality. Finally, there may be other harms not captured in this study.

The most important element, however, is that they sought the perspective of young people themselves, who are to date rarely heard in these discussions.

As this research begins, at Techdirt Mike Masnick reports on two new finished papers also covering teens and social media. The first, Social Media Use and Well-Being Across Adolescent Development, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is a three-year study of 100,991 Australian adolescents to find whether well-being was associated with social media use. The researchers, from the University of South Australia, found a U-shaped curve: moderate social media use was associated with the best outcomes, while both the highest users and the non-users showed less well-being. Girls benefited increasingly from moderate social media use from mid-adolescence onwards, while in boys’ non-use became increasingly problematic, leading to worse outcomes than high use by their late teens.

The second, a study from the University of Manchester published in the Journal of Public Health, followed a group of 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds to find out whether the use of technology such as social media and gaming accurately predicted later mental health issues. The study found no evidence that heavier use of social media or gaming led to increased symptoms of anxiety or depression in the following year.

In his discussion of these two papers, Masnick argues that this research gives weight to his contention that the widespread claim that social media is inherently harmful is wrong.

In the UK and elsewhere, however, politicians are proceeding on the basis that social media *is* inevitably harmful. . This week, the government announced a consultation on children’s use of technology. The consultation seems, as Carly Page writes at The Register, geared toward increasing restrictions, Also this week, the House of Lords voted 261 to 150, defeating the government to add an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill that would require social media services to add age verification to block under-16s from accessing them within a year. MPs will now have to vote to remove the amendment or it will become law, a backdoor preemption of the House of Commons’ prerogative to legislate.

UK prime minister Keir Starmer has been edging toward a social media ban for under-16s; now with added pressure from not only the Lords but also the Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, and 61 MPs sent an open letter supporting a ban like the one in Australia. Ofcom reports that 22% of children aged eight to 17 have a false user age of over 18 – but also that often it’s with their parents’ help. Would this be different under a national ban?

Starmer reportedly wants to delay deciding until evidence from Australia and, one presumes, from the consultation, is available. A sensible idea we hope is not doomed to failure.

Illustrations: Time magazine’s 1995 “Cyberporn” cover, which raised early alarm about kids online. Based on a fraudulent study, it nonetheless influenced policy-making for some years.

Also this week:
At the Plutopia podcast, we interview Dave Evans on his work to combat misinformation.

The censorship-industrial complex

In a sign of the times, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that in 2029 the annual Oscars ceremony will move from ABC to YouTube, where it will be viewable worldwide for free. At Variety, Clayton Davis speculates how advertising will work – perhaps mid-roll? The obvious answer is to place the ads between the list of nominees and opening the envelope to announce the winner. Cliff-hanger!

The move is notable. Ratings for the awards show have been declining for decades. In 1960, 45.8 million people in the US watched the Oscars – live, before home video recording. In 1998, the peak, 55.2 million, after VCRs, but before YouTube. In 2024: 19.5 million. This year, the Oscars drew under 18.1 million viewers.

On top of that, broadcast TV itself is in decline. One of the biggest audiences ever gathered for a single episode of a scripted show was in 1983: 100 million, for the series finale of M*A*S*H. In 2004, the Friends finale drew 52.5 million. In 2019, the Big Bang Theory finale drew just 17.9 million. YouTube has more than 2.7 billion active users a month. Whatever ABC was paying for the Oscars, reach may matter more than money, especially in an industry that is also threatened by shrinking theater audiences. In the UK, YouTube is second most-watched TV service ($), after only the BBC.

The move suggests that the US audience itself may also not be as uniquely important as it was historically. The Academy’s move fits into many other similar trends.

***

During this week’s San Francisco power outage, an apparently unexpected consequence was that non-functioning traffic lights paralyzed many of the city’s driverless Waymo taxis. In its blog posting, the company says, “While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.”

Friends in San Francisco note that the California Driver’s Handbook (under “Traffic Control”) is specific about what to do in such situations: treat the intersection as if it had all-way stop signs. It’s a great example of trusting human social cooperation.

Robocars are, of course, not in on this game. In an uncertain situation they can’t read us. So the volume of requests overwhelmed the remote human controllers and the cars froze, blocking intersections and even sidewalks. Waymo suspended the service temporarily, and says it is updating the cars’ software to make them act “more decisively” in such situations in future.

Of course, all these companies want to do away with the human safety drivers and remote controllers as they improve cars’ programming to incorporate more edge cases. I suspect, however, that we’ll never really reach the point where humans aren’t needed; there will always be new unforeseen issues. Driving a car is a technical challenge. Sharing the roads with others is a social effort requiring the kind of fuzzy flexibility computers are bad at. Getting rid of the humans will mean deciding what level of dysfunction we’re willing to accept from the cars.

Self-driving taxis are coming to London in 2026, and I’m struggling to imagine it. It’s a vastly more complex city to navigate than San Francisco, and has many narrow, twisty little streets to flummox programmers used to newer urban grids.

***

The US State Department has announced sanctions barring five people and potentially their families from obtaining visas to enter or stay in the US, labeling them radical activists and weaponized NGOs. They are: Imran Ahmed, an ex-Labour advisor and founder and CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate; Clare Melford, founder of the Global Disinformation Index; Thierry Breton, a former member of the European Commission, whom under secretary of state for public diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers, called “a mastermind” of the Digital Services Act; and Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, managing directors of the independent German organization HateAid, which supports people affected by digital violence. Ahmed, who lived in Washington, DC, has filed suit to block his deportation; a judge has issued a temporary restraining order.

It’s an odd collection as a “censorship-industrial complex”. Breton is no longer in a position to make laws calling US Big Tech to account; his inclusion is presumably a warning shot to anyone seeking to promote further regulation of this type. GDI’s site’s last “news” posting was in 2022. HateAid has helped a client file suit against Google in August 2025, and sued X in July for failing to remove criminal antisemitic content. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has also been in court to oppose antisemitic content on X and Instagram; in 2024 Elon Musk called it a ‘criminal organization’. There was more logic to”the three people in hell” taught to an Irish friend as a child (Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth I, and Martin Luther).

Whatever the Trump administration’s intention, the result is likely to simply add more fuel to initiatives to lessen European dependence on US technology.

Illustrations: Christmas tree in front of the US Capitol in 2020 (via Wikimedia).

Sovereign immunity

At the Gikii conference in 2018, a speaker told us of her disquiet after receiving a warning from Tumblr that she had replied to several messages posted there by a Russian bot. After inspecting the relevant thread, her conclusion was that this bot’s postings were designed to increase the existing divisions within her community. There would, she warned, be a lot more of this.

We’ve seen confirming evidence over the years since. This week provided even more when X turned on location identification for all accounts, whether they wanted it or not. The result has been, as Jason Koebler writes at 404 Media, to expose the true locations of accounts purporting to be American, posting on political matters. A large portion of the accounts behind viral posts designed to exacerbate tensions are being run by people in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, and Russia, among others, with generative AI acting as an accelerant.

Unlike the speaker we began with, in his analysis, Koebler finds that the intention behind most of this is not to stir up divisions but simply to make money from an automated ecosystem that makes it easy. The US is the main target simply because it’s the most lucrative market. He also points out that while X’s new feature has led people to talk about it, the similar feature that has long existed on Facebook and YouTube has never led to change because, he writes, “social media companies do not give a fuck about this”. Cue the Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his Salary depends upon his not understanding it”

The incident reminded that this type of fraud in general seems to be endemic, especially in the online advertising ecosystem. In March, Portsmouth senior lecturer Karen Middleton submitted evidence (PDF) to a UK Parliamentary Select Committee Inquiry arguing that the advertising ecosystem urgently needs regulatory attention as a threat to information integrity. At the Financial Times, Martin Wolf thinks that users should be able to sue the platforms for reimbursement when they are tricked by fraudulent ads – a model that might work for fraudulent ads that cause quantifiable harm but not for those that cause wider, less tangible, social harm. Wolf cites a Reuters report from Jeff Horwitz, who analyzes internal Facebook documents to find that the company itself expected 10% of its 2024 revenues – $16 billion – to come from ads for scams and banned goods.

Search Engine Land, citing Juniper Research, estimated in 2023 that $84 billion in advertising spend would be lost to ad fraud that year, and predicted a rise to $172 billion by 2028. Spider Labs estimates 2024 losses at over $37.7 billion, based on traffic data it’s analyzed through its fraud prevention tool, and 2025 losses at $41.4 billion. For context, DataReportal puts global online ad revenue at close to $790.3 billion in 2024. Also for comparison, Adblock Tester estimated last week that ad blockers cut publishers’ advertising revenues on average by 25% in 2023, costing them up to $50 billion a year.

If Koebler is correct in his assessment, until or unless advertisers rebel the incentives are misplaced and change will not happen.

***

Enforcement of the Online Safety Act has continued to develop since it came into force in July. This week, Substack became the latest to announce it would implement age verification for whatever content it deems to be potentially harmful. Paid subscribers are exempt on the basis that they have signed up with credit cards, which are unavailable in the UK to those under 18.

In October, we noted the arrival of a lawsuit against Ofcom brought in US courts by 4Chan and Kiwi Farms. The lawyer’s name, Preston Byrne, sounded familiar; I now remember he talked bitcoin at the 2015 Tomorrow’s Transaction Forum.

James Titcomb writes at the Daily Telegraph that Ofcom’s lawyers have told the US court that it is a public regulatory authority and therefore has “sovereign immunity”. The lawsuit contends that Ofcom is run as a “commercial enterprise” and therefore doesn’t get to claim sovereign immunity. Plus: the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, with age verification spreading to Australia and the EU, on X Byrne is advocating that US states enact foreign censorship shield laws. One state – Wyoming – has already introduced one. The draft GRANITE Act was filed on November 19. Among other provisions, the law would permit US citizens who have been threatened with fines to demand three times the amount in damages – potentially billions for a company like Meta, which can be fined up to 10% of global revenue under various UK and EU laws. That clause would have to pass the US Congress. In the current mood, it might; in July in a report the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee called the EU’s Digital Services Act a foreign censorship threat.

It’s hard to know how – or when – this will end. In 1990s debates, many imagined that the competition to enforce national standards for speech across the world would lead either to unrestricted free speech or to a “least common denominator” regime in which the most restrictive laws applied everywhere. Byrne’s battle isn’t about that; it’s about who gets to decide.

Illustrations: A wild turkey strutting (by Frank Schulenberg at Wikimedia). Happy Thanksgiving!

Also this week:
At Plutopia, we interview Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at ACLU.