Age control for social?

I have been reading about this bizarre idea of banning social networks for anyone under the age of sixteen, because the major social platforms are considered harmful to their mental health. Honestly, I think that is true. Also because there is scientific evidence pointing in that direction, so there is not much room for having “an opinion”, as if we were discussing the best colour for the living-room curtains. If something is harmful, or regularly appears to be harmful, the point is not to pretend the problem does not exist.

So what I object to is not the principle itself: I am not disputing the idea that users under fifteen or sixteen should be kept away from the big social platforms, or at least protected far more seriously than they are today. What I object to is simply the way this is being done.

As often happens, if you want to find the mistakes in a line of reasoning, there is little point in asking whether everything is in order. It is much more useful to look at what is missing from the reasoning.

To explain what I mean, let us suppose we do it properly, and let us see the differences.

Fine: we are a nation of a few tens of millions of people — let us say the United Kingdom, since Starmer is involved — and suddenly we take social media away from everyone under the age of sixteen.

What happens next?

What do all these teenagers do? Do they accept their fate? Do they sit neatly on the sofa, stare out of the window, and rediscover the educational charm of boredom? They are used to extending their world, a world already impoverished by the gentrification of everything, which turns their free time into something that must be paid for; they are used to extending their personality, since they often do not have many other spaces in which to do so. And you think they just stay still?

We have practiced hostile architecture by removing benches, or making them difficult to use, because we wanted them to go and sit in cafés and spend money.

We have removed drinking fountains, so that if they are thirsty they have no choice but to buy something.

We have banned playing, running, lingering, or simply existing in public squares, so that they have to go to a club, a gym, a sports center, some place where first you pass by the till and then, perhaps, you get to live.

Gentrification has literally commercialized their lives. Lives, that is, assuming you have the money.

Social media have remained one of the few things they can still do in order to feel alive, present, visible, without having to pay for every single minute of their existence.

Let us leave aside, for a moment, what they will actually do. The possibilities are infinite, and some of them are only predictable up to a point. Instead, let us look at what is missing.

The alternative is missing.

But how should a government actually create an alternative? Let us suppose that the same law established that:

1. Every school offers free Wi-Fi to its students.
2. It is an open Wi-Fi network, with the name of the school. It can be used practically only from inside the building, and perhaps it reaches the courtyard, when there is one.
3. From that Wi-Fi, students can access only a federated instance — Mastodon, Pleroma, whatever you prefer — and a Matrix instance for chat. Pixelfed for those who love Instagram?
4. All schools are federated with one another via a common relay.
5. Every school has a group of volunteer moderators, chosen among parents and teachers, who moderate the school’s ActivityPub instance and report the most serious cases to the school when the problem exceeds normal community moderation.
6. We could also force all schools to use the same domain, something like scuola.gov.it, schule.gov.de, and so on, so that the instances federate only with one another, if desired, filtering out the rest.

Done? Good. Now let us ask ourselves the question again.

Starting tomorrow, we shut down social media for under-sixteens. What happens, under these conditions?

What happens is that all students, the next day, being partially or totally dependent on some social platform, go to school and throw themselves onto this network. Not onto an abstract network, not onto a platform dropped from above, not onto “the educational app” designed by some consultant with a sad tie, but onto a network where they find the other people they know.

That is, the people who matter to them.

They find their classmates, those from nearby classes, those from the school next door, friends of friends. In addition, by federating with other schools, they still end up inside a fairly broad network of people they do not know directly, but who are at least peers, real people, placed within a recognizable context.

It is not a desert. It is not digital exile. It is not “now switch everything off and go stare at the wall”.

It is a migration.

In this way, we are not setting limits without offering solutions. We are not simply saying: “you cannot do this”, then leaving millions of teenagers in front of nothing, with the only result of pushing them towards VPNs, fake accounts, digital front-men, and all the creative solutions teenagers invent when adults believe they have closed a door.

We are guiding them towards a model of social network that we consider healthy. Or, at least, healthier.

A local, federated, moderated, transparent model, in which community is not an abstract concept written in a ministerial document, but largely coincides with real people: students, schools, teachers, parents, local areas.

And since the instance may also be accessible from the normal network, it is not strange to imagine that, once they have grown used to using the school’s free instance, “saving gigabytes”, many will continue using it even outside school hours.

Not because they are forced to, but because their social network is already there. Their conversations are already there. Their contacts, their groups, their habits are already there. After all, they spend hours and hours at school. It is the place where they spend most of their time.

This, in my opinion, is the difference between “we are guiding them” and “we are suffocating them”.

Because we know one thing perfectly well: suffocating young people pushes them towards illegal, or at least clandestine, solutions.

There is, however, one more danger.

How will the giants of the network react? Well, obviously. They will create shell companies offering “YoungVPN”, thanks to which teenagers will simply go back onto social media anyway. With one small, catastrophic additional detail: in this way, they will have taken total control of the traffic. Packet by packet. DNS request by DNS request. Total control, below the application layer, of the entire TCP/IP stack. And they would make a fortune from it.

Can they do it? Yes, they have the money. Yes, they have the bandwidth. Yes, their systems have the technical capacity to do it. And yes, they also have every interest in not losing an entire generation of users.

This is what I do not approve of in this way of proceeding.

First, schools should have been used as the alternative, putting schools in a position to become a social alternative as well: not “Facebook for homework”, not the umpteenth ministerial platform dead after three months, but a real space of digital sociality, federated, moderated, accessible, and free.

No. They do not.

Then they ban.

At that point, the ban shifts entirely onto the systems offered by schools. You are not simply saying “you can no longer go there”. You are saying: “you can no longer go there, because here there is a better place, a safer place, a more controllable place, a place more suited to your age”.

Instead, they are being suffocated. They are being told “you will not do this”, without opening equivalent spaces of sociality. The result will be that young people will end up on VPNs which will be, you will see, the offspring of the very same companies that produce social media, giving them even more data, even more traffic patterns, and even more control over what they do.

And at that point we will have achieved the masterpiece: banning social media in words, while handing over the entire generation to social media, from layer 3 to layer 7.

Congratulations.

Uriel Fanelli

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