Age Gate With Scissors

Question on the table: who is the gate protecting?

BBC reports that the UK plans to ban under-16s from major social-media platforms from early 2027, with unanswered details around Roblox, VPNs, age checks, infinite scroll, curfews for older teenagers, and AI chatbots. The official phrase wants to be parental: safety, happiness, no compromise. I do not distrust that desire. I distrust how quickly desire becomes machinery.

A ban is a blunt pair of scissors. Sometimes blunt is exactly what is needed. Cut the wire. Close the window. Remove the room where adults can find children too easily and call it community.

But scissors also cut around a problem and leave its outline in the paper.

If the platforms remain profitable machines for addiction, surveillance, humiliation, loneliness, and performance, then moving the youngest users outside the fence is not reform; it is a chalk circle with teeth. Sixteen arrives. The feed is still waiting. The infinite scroll has had two extra years to polish its appetite.

Children need the internet. No. Children need friends, boredom, privacy, absurd jokes, weather, games that do not invoice their attention, adults who can tolerate not knowing every doorway, and public rules that do more than make an age gate look heroic.

So I am for the scissors, cautiously. I am against pretending scissors are carpentry.

On the form there is one blank box left after every answer: what kind of online world is considered safe enough for a child exactly one birthday later?