There is a reliable test for whether a law is really about the thing it claims to protect: ignore what it promises and look at what it demands. A measure that truly wanted to spare children the harm of screens would go after the hours they spend in front of them, because the hours are what the evidence shows is the problem. The legislation Britain just passed does the opposite. It requires every adult in the country to identify themselves before going online, in the name of matriarchal, safety first, authoritarianism.
Since 25 July 2025, reaching a growing share of the internet (a supposedly neutral platform) here has meant proving your age with your face, your passport, or your bank as a character reference, with Ofcom able to fine a company a tenth of its global revenue for letting you through unchecked.
All of it is sold to you as protecting children. Nobody campaigns against safe children (if you do, you're a monster of course), and no politician ever lost a vote for them. That makes "won't somebody think of the children" the most useful sentence in government, a skeleton key that opens any door, because the only people standing behind it are the ones you are not allowed to question. What is being built is a permissioned internet, an identity layer bolted onto daily life, and a quiet rewriting of you from free citizen into verified (and easily tracked and identified) user.
Of course there is evidence that developing minds are influenced by screen time and not all screen time is good. The proportion of British children aged eight to sixteen with a probable mental disorder rose from 12.5% in 2017 to 20.3% in 2023. Ofcom found that 8% of children aged eight to fourteen had seen online pornography in a single month, some of them only eight or nine. The Birmingham SMART Schools study, the most serious British work on this, found that the more time a child spends on a phone, the worse their sleep, their wellbeing, their grades and their behaviour tend to be. Researchers like Jonathan Haidt argue the damage runs deeper still. If you are a parent watching your child disappear into a screen, you are not imagining the problem. You are right to be frightened.
The most rigorous study on screens and young minds, by Oxford's Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben across more than 355,000 young people, found that technology use explains at most 0.4% of the variation in adolescent wellbeing. A weaker link than wearing glasses, about the same as eating potatoes. The headlines never agree because, working the same data, the pair found over six hundred million defensible ways to analyse it, enough to produce a terrifying result, a reassuring one, or nothing at all, to taste.
Then there is the one real world test we have run. The Birmingham study compared schools that ban phones during the day with schools that allow them and found no difference in wellbeing, anxiety, depression, sleep, exercise, grades or behaviour. None. The bans cut phone use inside school but left total daily use untouched, and total use is the only thing that tracks harm. Restricting access at the school gate changed nothing, because the gate was never where the problem lived.
Together, those findings sink the remedy. Harm tracks the total hours a child spends staring at a device, not which app they are permitted to open. Age-verifying social media targets the precise lever the evidence says is inert, and doesn't even consider the benefits as a counter argument.
Which raises the obvious question: if the cure does not cure, why spend so much building it? Because the point was never to cure anything; it was to make everyone identifiable. You cannot prove one user is fifteen without a system that checks every user is who they say they are. Age assurance is identity assurance with a kinder name, digital ID arriving without a vote or a debate anyone noticed, wearing the most sympathetic face available.
The government survey carried out this spring, the one quietly measuring how much of this the public will swallow (nudge nudge), is revealing in a way its authors may not have intended. Asked what they actually want, people put a blanket ban dead last, chosen first by just 16%. What they back instead is control over specific features and limits on screen time, supported by three-quarters to nine in ten. None of that requires anyone to hand over their name; only verification does that.
The cruellest detail is in the children's own answers. Ask the young people all this is meant to protect what age checks would really do, and the consequence they name most is handing over private information such as their ID: roughly four in ten of a representative sample, and nearly four in five of the more engaged children who replied directly. Meanwhile four in five parents are content to wave the checks through, so long as the words "keep children safer" are attached.
The people the policy claims to rescue can see the trap more clearly than the adults consenting on their behalf. And the trap is real: an identity confirmed is an identity stored, and a database of children's faces is a breach in waiting. Even Pornhub's parent company, hardly a privacy charity, says the new rules have made the internet more dangerous. None of this makes the child safer; it only makes the child catalogued.
You will not win this with an argument, however good: the slogan is unbeatable, which is the entire reason it was chosen. What you can do is refuse to be quite so legible. The whole machine assumes you are identifiable, and therefore censorable. Your money moves only with permission, and your access to ordinary life can be revoked by a body you never elected, your data sitting on its servers the whole time. An identified person is easy to segregate and to punish, for speaking their mind, for exposing what authority would rather keep buried, or for declining to fall in line. So take the parts back. Learn the open-source tools that let you be your own authority. This is not a product to buy but a posture to adopt, while adopting it is still allowed.
Every age that wanted its people legible has found an unanswerable reason: the heretic, the foreigner, the criminal, the terrorist. Ours has found the best one yet, because they are not really coming for the children at all. The children are the alibi. The target is what it always is, the one minority no charity collects for, no march defends and no law protects: the individual, standing alone and asked to prove he deserves to be here.
The most vulnerable minority has always been the individual. Get your house in order while you still can, because the door is closing politely, and it is closing for your own good.