Checking IDs While the Foundation Cracks
- Leah
- Jul 6
- 8 min read
Rights, responsibilities, and the systems nobody will fix
A personal prelude — feel free to skip if you’re in a hurry
I have M.E. — myalgic encephalomyelitis — which means the world outside my door is, on its more demanding days, a complicated proposition. The upside is an unusual amount of uninterrupted time to think. No commute. Fewer social obligations. Less of life’s noise competing for attention.
What I did have, consistently, was connectivity. Being innately curious and cautious by disposition, I spent a lot of that time watching something most people were too busy to notice: the systems shaping our information ecosystems, their impacts on people and on society, and the political responses consistently failing to address them.
Consider this the disclosure that explains the obsession. Now, to the point.
The Policy Pattern
A pattern has been consolidating across high-trust liberal democracies.
Australia introduced a hard ban on social media access for under-16s. Canada followed with legislation creating a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with sweeping enforcement authority. The UK announced similar age restrictions, layered on top of an already expansive online safety framework. Denmark, Norway, France, Spain, and others are watching and moving in the same direction.
The stated rationale is consistent across all of them: protect children from online harm.
The instinct is sound. No decent person argues that children should be unprotected from grooming, exploitation, addictive design, or deliberate psychological manipulation. That much is not in dispute.
What is in dispute — and what is almost entirely absent from mainstream policy debate — is whether any of these measures address the systems generating the harm. They don’t.
What they address is access. Yet access is not the problem.
What Isn’t Being Regulated
The visible layer of policy targets the user: age gates, verification systems, platform duties, content restrictions. The burden falls primarily on the public — children, parents, ordinary adults navigating bureaucratic compliance systems — and on platforms to enforce rules at scale.
What remains largely untouched is the machine producing the harm in the first place.
That machine has a specific architecture. Algorithms built to maximise attention.
Recommendation systems that reward outrage over reflection. Advertising models that monetise emotional destabilisation. Platforms that are more profitable when users are angry, anxious, or afraid. This is not incidental. It is the design. The incentive structure selects, systematically, for content that damages trust, degrades attention, and inflames rather than informs.
This is what I have previously called Dehumanisation Capitalism: a system in which harm is not a side effect but a revenue stream. It operates through a vast and interconnected ecosystem — platforms, advertisers, data brokers, content amplifiers, and the political infrastructure that feeds on the attention economy. The question worth asking is not just who profits from harmful content, but who profits from keeping the environment that produces it exactly as it is.
Intervention lands on users because users have no seat at the table. The machine does — and so does everyone whose position depends on it.
The most sophisticated harm online is produced by bot farms, coordinated inauthentic networks, and state-backed influence operations running through anonymous accounts with followings in the millions. Some are domestic, many foreign, most operating with near-total impunity. A number are operating on behalf of governments whose interests are served by keeping our societies divided, distracted, and mistrustful of one another.
Pressuring another state to rein in operations launched from its own soil is slow, diplomatically costly, and easily resisted. Restricting your own citizens is none of those things. So the citizen gets the law. The operation continues. The actors doing the most harm are precisely the ones our institutions find most inconvenient to touch.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
Online access is part of modern life. For many, it is not a lifestyle choice. It is infrastructure.
People with mobility limitations. Chronic illness. Social anxiety. Geographic isolation. For these groups, connectivity is often the primary means of staying cognitively active, engaged, and socially present. Restricting that access in the name of safeguarding is not protecting the vulnerable. It is compounding their vulnerability while leaving the actual sources of harm intact.
My own experience sits squarely in this territory. Connectivity kept my mind active during periods when the outside world was largely inaccessible. It also exposed me, repeatedly, to the full spectrum of what these systems can do — the manipulative, the radicalising, the algorithmically amplified outrage. The difference between being damaged by that exposure and developing a functional immunity to it was not restricted access. It was disposition, and developed judgment.
Some people arrive equipped with curiosity and caution as default settings. Most people can develop those qualities, given the right conditions. Nobody develops them by being locked out.
That distinction — between restricting access and building capacity — is the one current policy is systematically failing to make.
System Design Is the Missing Variable
The framing that dominates this debate measures the wrong thing. It treats time online, or age of access, as the primary variable. Reduce exposure, the logic goes, and you reduce harm.
The evidence does not support this. The harm policymakers point to is not a function of how long someone is online. It is a function of what kind of system they are inside.
Thirty minutes inside a manipulative, outrage-optimised platform can leave a person more destabilised than three hours inside an environment designed for learning, contribution, and genuine connection. The variable is not the screen. It is the architecture of the system — what it is optimised for, what behaviours it rewards, and what it does to the cognitive and emotional state of the people within it.
This reframes the entire debate. The goal cannot simply be to reduce exposure, especially when digital exposure is a permanent feature of modern life. It has to be to change what exposure does to people. And that requires changing the systems, not just restricting the users.
Credible voices in tech policy have been raising these concerns for years; the measures being proposed concentrate significant power in centralised commissions while doing little to address the underlying dynamics of harm. These are not fringe positions. They are technically grounded, constitutionally literate, and largely ignored by the political class moving the policies forward. (Look up Michael Geist if you want a taste.)
The concerns are documented. The direction continues unchanged. Why?
The Voting Age Contradiction
There is a detail in this policy landscape that deserves more attention than it has received.
Several of the same countries restricting under-16s from social media are simultaneously debating lowering the voting age to 16.
Read that again.
Sixteen-year-olds would be granted formal participation in the democratic process while being restricted from the information environment where political opinion increasingly forms.
Two readings are available. One: nobody has joined the dots. The other: the dots have been joined, and the resulting picture is considered acceptable.
Readers can decide for themselves which they find more persuasive.
What Liberal Democracies Are Actually Risking
Liberal societies depend on a functioning balance between rights, responsibilities, and legitimate state action. When governments restrict the many while leaving the systems generating harm largely intact, something corrosive begins.
People notice when the burden of compliance falls on ordinary users while platforms, advertisers, and bad-faith actors face only partial constraints. They notice when the most visible policy responses target the public rather than the powerful. And when they notice, trust erodes — not in social media, but in the institutions claiming to protect them.
Trust is not a soft variable. It is the foundation on which free societies function. Citizens accept restrictions more readily when they believe the rules are coherent, fair, and aimed at the genuine source of the problem. Remove that belief, and what remains is cynicism — the sense that the state is more comfortable regulating the public than confronting the interests it depends on, courts, or fears.
Then there is the contrast that should give everyone pause. The same cluster of countries that have moved most aggressively on social media restrictions — Australia, the UK, Canada — have tolerated organised incitement and pro-violence rhetoric, including open advocacy for groups their own governments designate as terrorist organisations.
It is an inversion that would have seemed absurd not long ago: rising scrutiny of ordinary citizens, rising accommodation of those openly hostile to the principles these democracies were built on.
What Genuine Safeguarding Would Require
A policy serious about protecting people — children and adults alike — would shift responsibility toward the systems and actors generating harm, not toward the users most exposed to it.
That means demanding structural change from platforms: not just content moderation at the edges, but reform of the incentive architecture driving amplification. It means holding advertising models accountable for what they fund. It means treating addictive design as a liability, not a feature. It means building environments where the incentives reward understanding, contribution, and genuine connection rather than outrage, dependency, and tribal conflict.
It also means investing in the human capacity to navigate complex information environments. Curiosity and caution can be cultivated. Epistemic independence can be taught. The ability to distinguish a claim from evidence, a narrative from a fact, manipulation from persuasion — these are developable skills, at scale, if institutions treat their development as a priority rather than an afterthought.
Immunity scales. Prohibition does not.
The policy goal cannot be to keep people out of difficult environments indefinitely. It has to ensure that when people enter those environments — and they will — they are equipped to function within them without being consumed.
That is a harder project than passing an age-gate law. It is slower, and it requires confronting systems with significant political and economic leverage. It also happens to be the only approach that addresses the root cause rather than the symptom.
The Question Underneath All of This
Safeguarding children is right. Protecting vulnerable people from exploitation and manipulation is right. Nobody is arguing otherwise.
The question is whether the policies being enacted are actually doing that — or whether they are doing something else: normalising state control over communication infrastructure, concentrating enforcement power in bodies with limited democratic accountability, and managing the optics of harm while leaving its machinery intact.
These are not comfortable questions for governments to face. They are, however, the questions a free society should be asking loudly, and soon. Because some of what is being legislated now will be very difficult to unlegislate later. And the definitions of “harm” written into these frameworks are broad enough that the line between protecting people and silencing them is dangerously thin.
The exit reflex — the instinct to remove rather than equip, to restrict rather than redesign — feels like protection.
In practice, it is the transfer of a problem from one place to another, while the systems generating it continue operating exactly as designed.
This is not safeguarding. It is management. And the people bearing the cost of that management are, as usual, the ones with the least to gain from the current arrangement.
If protecting children is truly the objective, the obvious question is not whether governments should act. It is why so much of that action is aimed at the people exposed to the harm, and so little at the systems producing it.
Until that question is answered, citizens are entitled to wonder whether these policies are solving the problem — or simply managing public concern about it.
This piece is part of a developing body of work on epistemic erosion, system design, and the infrastructure liberal democracies need to remain functional. Related essays: The Commodification of Harm; Social Media Isn’t The Problem — The Incentives Are; The Split-Screen Society; Cultural Autoimmune Collapse; and When Reality Breaks, Who Repairs It?
The good news is that none of this is inevitable. Harmful systems are designed. That means different systems can be designed too. More on that another time.
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