BBC carrying water for the facists in the UK to ban kids from the internet because they might get radicalized with all the shit the fascists are doing (or indoctrinated by fascist influencers).

Heavens forbid that they actually attack the companies and the algorithms that harm the kids.

Yeah but how else am I supposed to shut the thing up so I can ignore it when I’m at a restaurant? Should I just let it keep screaming? I mean, I do that, too. No one else is trying to have a nice night out, right?

-every shitty parent

This article is about social media and teens, not about little kids watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood cartoons or Sesame Street. The title is totally misleading.

So I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is what can we as a community do to maximize the children’s screen time to increase profits for the shareholders?

Pseudo scientific garbage

I’d argue “not just children”, if you’ve ever encountered Facebook Boomers or Truth Social zombies you know what I mean.

The headline does not match the article:

There is no consensus among the wider scientific community that screen time overall is harmful to children.

The article is mostly about a political determination that the topic polls well, mixed with a comparison between social media and tobacco. Time on screen may or may not include time on social media, and not all social media engagement is the same.

Former health secretary Wes Streeting has backed banning under-16s from social media in the UK, accusing regulators and politicians of being “asleep at the wheel” on the issue.

Wes Streeting? Is that the same Wes Streeting who defended Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein?

The Health Secretary who was received over £350,000 in donations from private healthcare companies?

Who was texting with Mandelson about visiting the US to meet industry figures in the healthcare sector?

The one selling out the NHS to Palantir and the US? That Wes Streeting.

Everyone knows not to trust a word out of his mouth now, surely.

The prime minister vowed on Tuesday to take “decisive” action to tackle the impact of social media on children.

“I’m absolutely clear that this needs to be something where there’s a game changer, so we will be acting,” Starmer told reporters.

“The question is only what we do, and that will be coming very quickly because we took powers earlier this year to make sure we can act very, very quickly.”

Oh right.

“Screen Time” doesnt harm children in any measurable way.

“Chatting with an LLM” or “playing a freemium gatcha game” may, but simply playing with an electronic device isn’t implicitly harmful. Scientists have looked at the data for years, and there’s simply no support for the latest pearl clutching over how technology changes childhood.

(A far stronger case can me made that smartphones are detrimental to computer literacy, but that’s a far different ball of cheese.)

The title of the article on the BBC page currently reads:

Streeting backs under-16s social media ban as government consultation concludes

And a quote from the article:

There is no consensus among the wider scientific community that screen time overall is harmful to children.