Children must be protected from the truth

 Thu 8:29 am +00:00, 18 Jun 2026  1

posted by Tapestry

The sinister anti-democratic aim behind Starmer’s ‘child-safety’ social media ban
By
Dr Tony Rucinski
–
TAP. Governments have just noticed. Children believe in all the conspiracies that Disney brain adults reject. The internet was intended to rot the brains of children, but it’s having the opposite effect. Kids see things as they are, and are becoming well informed and intelligent observers of the world, immune to main media narratives which they don’t have time for.

June 18, 2026

WHEN a politician tells you he is acting for the children, watch his hands, not his mouth.

On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer announced that Britain will bar under-16s from social media including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit and the rest, in what the government called ‘a line in the sand’ and ‘a new normal for future generations’.

Who could object? Nine in ten parents who answered the government’s consultation backed the move, and I am not going to tell them they are wrong to be afraid. The online world has become a sewer for the young. The inquest into 14-year-old Molly Russell’s death found she had been served thousands of posts glorifying self-harm and suicide. Any parent who has watched a child vanish into a screen knows the algorithms are not neutral. I do not dispute for a moment that children need protecting. I dispute that this is what protecting them looks like.

The interesting part of this announcement is not the ban. It is the method – and the machinery it switches on.

Here is what was barely reported. The ban will never be set before Parliament as a Bill, to be argued clause by clause and amended. The power was taken in advance, written into an Act with a reassuring name – the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on April 29. Buried in it is a new Section 214A of the Online Safety Act, handing the Secretary of State a sweeping power to make regulations restricting children’s access to whole categories of online service, enforced by Ofcom with fines of up to a tenth of a company’s global turnover.

This is not how a free country normally decides what millions of its citizens may see and say. This is government by ministerial decree. Ministers promise Parliament a debate, but they may wave through or reject regulations whole, and cannot amend, cannot send to committee, cannot pick over line by line as they would a Bill of this scale.

The lawyers have noticed, even if the MPs have not. Neil Brown of decoded.legal called it ‘smearing the lipstick of discretion on a legislative pig’ and warned that ‘discretion and statutory instruments should be reserved for implementation details, not for policy decisions which affect millions of people’ Anna Cardaso of Liberty put the deeper danger plainly: ‘When you create a law, you have to think about what a future government could do with those powers.’ Expanding executive authority in an age of populist temptation, she said, is ‘very worrying’.

She is right, and the warning cuts across every party line. Today the lever is labelled ‘child safety’. It is still a lever, and it will still be there in other hands, on other days, for other purposes.

Then comes the question nobody in Downing Street wants asked: how, exactly, do you stop a 15-year-old logging on?

You cannot – not without checking everyone. A platform has no way of knowing whether an account belongs to a girl of 15 or a man of 50 unless it inspects the age of each, and the law already demands the checks be ‘highly effective’. In practice that means every user, adult and child alike, proving who they are at the door: a face scan, a credit card, a passport, or a government digital ID. Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch says it without flinching: ‘The only way to ban children from social media is through mandatory online ID checks for us all, adults and children alike.’ The result, she warns, is surveillance and ‘the death of anonymity’; no one, as she puts it, ‘should need to show their passport just to get online’. The Open Rights Group calls what is coming ‘a system of digital checkpoints’.

Ministers will say this is mere ‘age assurance’, not identity papers. Yet the Secretary of State’s own letter to Ofcom worries about adults who ‘lack the means to verify their age through passports or driving licences’. Strip the euphemism, and the means of assurance is your documents.

And consider who will run the checkpoints. The face-scanning already bolted on to Reddit and Roblox is operated by a private American firm, Persona, in which Peter Thiel – co-founder of the surveillance company Palantir – is a major investor, his venture fund having led its last two rounds of financing. We are not only being told to identify ourselves to the state: we are being told to hand our faces to whichever data company the state’s rules happen to enrich.

Now hold that beside another of this government’s projects. It is, separately, building a national digital ID – ministers insisting all the while that ‘there will be no legal obligation’ to have it. The child-protection ban supplies the reason; the digital ID supplies the infrastructure. Our children become the doormat on which the rest of us wipe our feet on our way into an identity-linked internet where anonymity – the shield of the whistleblower, the dissenter, the abuse survivor – is gone.

I am not alleging a master plan drawn up in a back room. I am pointing at what this government is doing in plain sight, all at once, and asking the oldest question in politics: who benefits? Consider that the same administration which deems a 15-year-old too immature to be trusted with Instagram is simultaneously legislating to hand that child the vote at 16, and to place 14-year-olds on the electoral register. Too young to choose a social network; old enough to choose a government. The state’s estimate of a young person’s judgement, it seems, bends to whichever answer enlarges the state.

If this were truly about child safety, you would expect the child-safety experts to be cheering. They are not. The Molly Rose Foundation – the charity set up in memory of Molly Russell – joined the NSPCC and more than 40 other children’s groups, academics and bereaved families to warn that ‘bans are the wrong answer to a vital question’, risking ‘unintended consequences that could leave children at greater risk of harm’. Their fear is not idle: in Australia, which brought in the same ban last December, three in five children aged 12 to 15 who had accounts beforehand still have them. And the government knows it: in the very letter ordering the ban, the Secretary of State concedes that ‘no ban can ever be entirely watertight’. When the bereaved families, the children’s charities and the responsible minister all tell you the law will not do what its headline promises, and it is pushed through anyway, the conclusion rather writes itself. The ban is the headline. The machine is the point.

Look, too, at what the ban spares. It exempts WhatsApp and Signal, the messaging apps through which much grooming and indecent imagery reaches children. A law built around a child’s safety would begin there. This one begins with the platforms that make headlines.

Protect children – yes, properly, by forcing the platforms to design out the harm rather than by mounting an identity checkpoint across the whole of public life. But do not let our children be made the alibi for the quiet construction of the two things this country has refused every time it has been asked for them: a government that knows who each of us is, and a public square it can redraw by regulation. Watch his hands.