Chris Stokel-Walker

Kids find a way around this.

And actually, Keir Starmer was saying that actually himself.

He was kind of rolling the ground in his announcement on Monday to say, this thing won't be 100% successful.

We appreciate that.

But something at least is better than nothing.

They're mostly congregating around the same idea of blocks and bands, effectively.

So there are a slew of different countries that are starting to do this.

One of the challenges that we have is all of them have done it relatively recently, with pretty much the exception of China, which has a curfew and has a kind of staggered approach to

social media access.

And truthfully, China, for a bunch of different reasons, including the way in which its society operates and people like that, isn't a good comparator to look at.

But you've got countries like Indonesia, like Malaysia, who have introduced bans on generally under-16s, although sometimes the ages differ.

Then you have a bunch of European countries that are kind of rowing in

behind ideas of either bands at 15 or 16 so you have Emmanuel Macron in France who is really welcoming the UK move yesterday he kind of I think tweeted something like welcome to the club saying you know this is a good move this is very smart Greece is looking at something similar there are lots of other countries thinking about this but all of those are to come in the future

There are a bunch of different regulatory regimes being put up by other countries, including giving fines to different platforms, but the amounts that we're talking about here are chump change.

An individual issue might be tens of millions of dollars of fines, but in reality, that is something that they can earn probably within a day or so at least.

It's kind of your risk versus reward appetite as a government of how much...

You want to risk potentially going towards a court case that you may or may not win versus trying to keep those platforms in line.

Yeah.

It doesn't tackle the actual issue, for one thing.

Lots of the features on social media are really pernicious, and particularly so for young people.