The New Dark Age

An “under-16s social media ban” would not really be a ban on children using social media at all.

In practice, it would almost certainly require millions of ordinary adults to prove who they are online simply to access parts of the internet – with pressure over time for wider and wider forms of digital ID, age verification and biometric checking.

And once those systems exist, they will not just determine whether you can get online.

They create the infrastructure to link your real identity to what you read, watch, search for, say and share online – and potentially who you communicate with – fundamentally changing the character of the internet from anonymous and open, to monitored and permission-based.

That is why this government consultation matters far beyond “child safety”.

Buried within it are proposals and questions around:

• Mandatory age assurance
• Biometric age estimation
• AI-based verification
• Restrictions on VPN access
• Platform-wide identity checks
• And growing controls over what features people can access online

The government’s heavily-loaded and frankly pretty terrifying consultation on this closes next Tuesday.

Campaigners Big Brother Watch have a useful guide to completing it HERE.

Like the Digital ID consultation – responses to which we are asked to believe were properly considered in just eight days before the policy appeared in the King’s Speech – there’s good reason to doubt this is a genuine consultation process.

But if people don’t respond, the lack of opposition will likely be used later as evidence of public support.

We’re aware some people have concerns about kids using social media.

Keeping in mind that if kids are online, this is a choice made by parents, we explained why this “ban” is no solution HERE, and simple ways to protect kids online without government interference HERE.

NEW: Printed Pledges available to order from our shop

By popular demand, you can now order a “Pledge Pack” of printed paper certificates for the Pledge against Digital ID, delivered to your door:

https://togetherdeclaration.org/product/pledge-pack/

The Pledge against Digital ID is not a petition.

It’s a public declaration that you will refuse government digital ID systems and “government by app.”

A similar pledge helped defeat Tony Blair’s ID cards in the 2000s – and was signed over one million times.

Labour’s Digital ID Bill is here

We now have the first details of the government’s new Digital ID Bill – officially called the “Digital Access to Services Bill”.

The plan builds on systems and laws that are already being put in place, including:

• The existing GOV UK One Login system (whose serious problems we’ve covered extensively)
• The GOV UK Wallet
• And the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, which created the legal framework for so-called “Digital Verification Services”.

This Bill would go much further.

Among other things, it would create an official government Digital ID system and link access to government services through a single One Login account.

The implications of this are enormous – and needless to say, Digital ID was never in the Labour manifesto.

We need to do everything we can to stop this Bill – will you help us today?

If you’d like to donate to this campaign, you can do that here – thank you.