“On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.”[1][i]– Robert Anton Wilson
Keir Starmer, before he resigned as Prime Minister of the UK, announced that, starting in spring 2027, everyone under 16 will be banned from using social media platforms, and all users will be subject to age verification, including adults.[ii] According to the UK government, in response to a query on whether all adults who already have a social media account will need to verify their age, it states that you will need to verify your age unless you have an account that “has been open for more than 16 years, has a credit card connected to it, or is linked to an email address that’s age-verified in other ways.”[iii] It goes on to note that anyone who has already verified their age under the Online Safety Act implemented last year will not need to reverify, however, requiring everyone who wants to use social media to establish what is essentially a digital ID, though it on its surface seems sane and necessary to protect children from harm, is totalitarian and a step towards a complete obliteration of the few civil liberties and privacy we have left.
Australia passed a similar social media ban for under 16’s last year, and other states that are considering such a ban include France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Austria, and Poland.[iv] In Canada, they have proposed a bill, the Safe Social Media Act, to bar children under 16 from accessing social media unless the platforms can prove that they have implemented policies to better protect kids online.[v] Part of this bill is the establishment of a new regulator, the Digital Safety Commission of Canada, which sounds eerily similar to the Disinformation Governance Board that the Biden regime announced, but quickly disbanded due to mockery and outrage, mainly from conservatives. A Digital Safety Commission will inevitably take on more responsibility than ‘protecting children’.
In reality, the goal of all this is not to protect children, that may be a byproduct, but the overarching objective is totalitarian control of what citizens can say on the internet, a once sensational and transformational technology that was supposed to make us freer than ever before, not imprison us, not enslave us. If our use of the internet and its various websites and platforms is decided by a nameless, faceless regime, then we cannot truly consider ourselves free. Western leaders, from all political parties, have spent years now ensuring us that we must resist autocracy and that we cannot let China, Russia, and North Korea take over the world, are happily imposing autocracy onto us, a supposedly free and civilized people. It is important to note that these social media bans and the digital verification system that must accompany it to enforce it, is supported by politicians from all sides. In America, Democrats and Republicans alike are in favor of either restricting or outright bans for children using social media. Republican Senators Katie Britt and Ted Cruz, together with Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Brian Schatz, introduced the Kids Off Social Media Act this year.[vi] This bill differs from others in that the outright ban only applies to children under 13, while those between 14 and 17 are banned from receiving ‘algorithmic targeting and mandating chronological feeds’. In Germany, both the Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic Party have proposed bans on social media for children under 14, and the SDP has added that for children between 14 and 16, they will be forced to use an alternative version of each social media application that is stripped of its algorithms, infinite scrolling and push notifications.[vii] Conservatives and liberal abound agree that kids must be protected from online harm. Conservative MP Laura Trott said on X that “I’ve fought for this as it’s the right thing to do. As Conservatives, we’ve always believed in safeguarding children. Adults should be free, but we must protect childhood.”, and the leader of the conservative party, Kemi Badenoch, said that “It is fantastic news that the Government has finally woken up to the dangers of social media for young people. This is an important step in helping parents to protect childhood for children.”[viii] Her only gripe was that Starmer had not acted sooner.
This notion that adults are still free, and that the ban is only intended to stop children from using social media, when to enforce this ban all internet users must be verified and logged, is preposterous. A foundational argument that is used to justify these bans is the idea that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat are designed to be addictive, and like any product, they are designed in such a way that regular use is encouraged. In America, there was a court case in Los Angeles in which a woman had sued Meta and Google for addicting her to their platforms and contributing heavily to her anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide.[ix] The jury ruled in favor of her, ruling that Meta was 70% liable and Google was 30% liable.[x] To many, this and similar impending cases are social media’s ‘big tobacco moment’. In social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, he argues that social media is an adult product that has been marketed towards children and keeps them addicted, much like gambling or drugs.[xi] One of the four solutions he proposes to solve this problem is barring children from using social media until they are 16 as well as banning smartphones from schools. The debate over the impact that social media has on children is crucial, however, instituting state sanctioned bans and digital verification checks is not about protecting children, it is about removing anonymity from the internet, which is not, contrary to what many obsequious cretins in the illiberal liberal class say, is nothing to fret about.
“What have you got to hide?” they will ask, but this misses the point. In a free society, you must have rights to privacy and yes, anonymity. That was a promise of the internet decades ago. China, a country we are told to revile, is an autocracy that has a mass surveillance and social credit system, where participation in public life is contingent on good behavior, in person and online, and yet, when our politicians propose the same type of system, we give in, bent by a narrative about protecting children from the ills of social media feeds. It may only be the seeds of a system like China’s, but it is certainly the basis for it. The willingness of citizens to back such a system augment this. Exploiting the plight of children to impose a totalitarian agenda is disgusting and has no place in a free society. Those who push these bills are fearmongering, despotic nitwits. For example, Canada’s Culture Minister Marc Miller said, “kids are dying”, and so, to stop this, we must give up our liberties and be logged in a digital government database that, as many critics of digital verification and identification argue, will eventually undergo mission creep and be used for more than just guarding access to social media platforms and other websites, but for other necessities to live, like online banking and working.[xii]
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a letter to the UK government earlier in May opposing the Starmer regime’s proposal to introduce a national digital ID system in the UK, that there are 6 main issues with such a program.[xiii] These are mission creep, violation of privacy rights, security risks, reliance on faulty and still developing technologies, discrimination, and the “deepening of entrenched power between the state and the public.”[xiv] The US is unique in that, although ID verification must be used to access adult content, mainly pornography, the first amendment bars the government from prosecuting citizens based on speech, including online speech, and from censoring speech. In the UK and Canada, however, there are hate speech laws that can be and have been used to charge people for speech related offenses, including for posts on social media. Expanding the state’s ability to monitor and record our activity online is submission. We saw the brutish and thuggish nature of the police state in action in Germany on 60 Minutes last year, where the police raided the homes of speech criminals, seizing their electronic devices, and we were shown authorities who are devoted to monitoring and documenting the online activity of citizens, flagging ‘hate speech’ and compiling files on troublemakers who post racist memes or who mock politicians.[xv] These departments, whose sole purpose is the surveillance of the citizenry, are essentially secret police. As Hannah Arendt notes on the job of the police in a totalitarian state, they are not deployed to “to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. Their chief political distinction is that they alone are in the confidence of the highest authority and know which political line will be enforced.”[xvi] Whatever the regime considers hate speech, whether its holocaust denialism or dead naming transgenders, is irrelevant, as eventually anyone who dissents from the illiberal liberal class will be targeted for censorship and potentially, imprisonment. Even though we are yet to be thrown into prison cells, laws like this social media ban passed in the UK and Australia. The mass surveillance apparatus that must be established to enforce it are the beginning of our enslavement to a reptilian, technocratic elite. This elite, the illiberal liberal class and the illiberal class together are not literally reptilian, but they are so inhumane and calculating that if they are or ever were human, they have either forgotten it, or they have forsaken it. We must not imprison ourselves. If we allow our speech and by proxy, our thoughts and minds to be monitored and controlled, we will become servants, ceding our humanity to a domineering, chilling political class.
[i] Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth, Second edition (Hilaritas Press, 2019).
[ii] UK Government, “Fact Sheet: New Rules to Protect Children Online,” GOV.UK, accessed July 7, 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fact-sheet-new-rules-to-protect-children-online/fact-sheet-new-rules-to-protect-children-online.
[iii] UK Government, “Fact Sheet.”
[iv] Aisha Malik, “These Are the Countries Moving to Ban Social Media for Children | TechCrunch,” Tech Crunch, June 15, 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/15/social-media-ban-children-countries-list/.
[v] House Of Commons of Canada, “Government Bill (House of Commons) C-34 (45-1) – First Reading – Safe Social Media Act – Parliament of Canada,” accessed July 7, 2026, https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-34/first-reading; Associated Press, “Canada’s Social Media Ban for under-16s Goes to Parliament,” World News, The Guardian, June 11, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/11/canada-social-media-ban-under-16-kids-children-bill-new-law-legislation.
[vi] House Of Commons of Canada, “Government Bill (House of Commons) C-34 (45-1) – First Reading – Safe Social Media Act – Parliament of Canada.”
[vii] Brian [D-HI Sen. Schatz, “Text – S.278 – 119th Congress (2025-2026): Kids Off Social Media Act,” legislation, US Congress, June 30, 2025, 2025-01-28, https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/278/text.
[viii] Felix Sassmannshausen, German Parties Back Social Media Ban For Minors, Legal Hurdles Loom – Health Policy Watch, Analysis, February 25, 2026, https://healthpolicy-watch.news/german-parties-align-on-social-media-ban/.
[ix] Laura Trott MP [@LauraTrottMP], “I’ve long fought for this as it’s the right thing to do. As Conservatives, we’ve always believed in safeguarding children. Adults should be free, but we must protect childhood.,” Tweet, Twitter, June 15, 2026, https://x.com/LauraTrottMP/status/2066403049778696633; Kemi Badenoch [@KemiBadenoch], “It is fantastic news that the Government has finally woken up to the dangers of social media for young people. This is an important step in helping parents protect childhood for children. Huge credit goes to @LauraTrottMP and my Shadow Cabinet for relentlessly fighting for https://t.co/xg9R00yVJ0,” Tweet, Twitter, June 15, 2026, https://x.com/KemiBadenoch/status/2066427042506117551.
[x] Rob Nicholls, “Meta and Google Just Lost a Landmark Social Media Addiction Case. A Tech Law Expert Explains the Fallout,” The Conversation, March 25, 2026, https://doi.org/10.64628/AA.eqyujwu6x.
[xi] Nicholls, “Meta and Google Just Lost a Landmark Social Media Addiction Case. A Tech Law Expert Explains the Fallout.”
[xii] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).
[xiii] Spencer Van Dyk, “‘Kids Just Aren’t on the Bargaining Table’: Miller Insists Canada Won’t Capitulate to Trump on Social Media Ban,” CP24, June 14, 2026, https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2026/06/14/kids-just-arent-on-the-bargaining-table-miller-insists-canada-wont-capitulate-to-trump-on-social-media-ban/.
[xiv] Paige Collings, “EFF Submission to UK Consultation on Digital ID,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 4, 2026, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-submission-uk-consultation-digital-id.
[xv] Collings, “EFF Submission to UK Consultation on Digital ID.”
[xvi] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin Modern Classics (Penguin Classics, 2017).
References
Aisha Malik. “These Are the Countries Moving to Ban Social Media for Children | TechCrunch.” Tech Crunch, June 15, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/15/social-media-ban-children-countries-list/.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Modern Classics. Penguin Classics, 2017.
Collings, Paige. “EFF Submission to UK Consultation on Digital ID.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 4, 2026. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-submission-uk-consultation-digital-id.
Dyk, Spencer Van. “‘Kids Just Aren’t on the Bargaining Table’: Miller Insists Canada Won’t Capitulate to Trump on Social Media Ban.” CP24, June 14, 2026. https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2026/06/14/kids-just-arent-on-the-bargaining-table-miller-insists-canada-wont-capitulate-to-trump-on-social-media-ban/.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024.
House Of Commons of Canada. “Government Bill (House of Commons) C-34 (45-1) – First Reading – Safe Social Media Act – Parliament of Canada.” Accessed July 7, 2026. https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-34/first-reading.
Nicholls, Rob. “Meta and Google Just Lost a Landmark Social Media Addiction Case. A Tech Law Expert Explains the Fallout.” The Conversation, March 25, 2026. https://doi.org/10.64628/AA.eqyujwu6x.
Press, Associated. “Canada’s Social Media Ban for under-16s Goes to Parliament.” World News. The Guardian, June 11, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/11/canada-social-media-ban-under-16-kids-children-bill-new-law-legislation.
Sassmannshausen, Felix. German Parties Back Social Media Ban For Minors, Legal Hurdles Loom – Health Policy Watch. Analysis. February 25, 2026. https://healthpolicy-watch.news/german-parties-align-on-social-media-ban/.
Sen. Schatz, Brian [D-HI. “Text – S.278 – 119th Congress (2025-2026): Kids Off Social Media Act.” Legislation. US Congress, June 30, 2025. 2025-01-28. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/278/text.
UK Government. “Fact Sheet: New Rules to Protect Children Online.” GOV.UK. Accessed July 7, 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fact-sheet-new-rules-to-protect-children-online/fact-sheet-new-rules-to-protect-children-online.
Wilson, Robert Anton. Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth. Second edition. Hilaritas Press, 2019.
Not Without Incident: Questioning Big Brother's Platitudes 
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