Nanny State Refuses To Care For Actual Children

The United Kingdom cares to meddle in its citizens’ private lives in nearly every area, but one. 

A new Australian law banning children under 16 from accessing social media comes into effect Wednesday, Politico reports. British lawmakers remain uninspired, despite Australia’s membership in the British Commonwealth. 

“There are no current plans to implement a smartphone or social media ban for children. It’s important we protect children while letting them benefit safely from the digital world, without cutting off essential services or isolating the most vulnerable,” a government spokesperson told the outlet. (RELATED: Foreign Leaders Caught Orchestrating Campaign To Censor American Right-Wing Media Companies)

🤐British police have made a huge number of CHILLING arrests over social media posts

“The government should immediately re-examine the laws that allow for this scale of arrest for online speech & rescue the UK’s worsening civil liberties reputation” – Maya Thomas, legal & policy… pic.twitter.com/5W5zeYThCu

— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) November 17, 2025

Let’s sincerely consider how children benefit from the “digital world.” They might encounter new, good ideas. They might access tutorials on how to bake, or sew, or repair something broken. And a social media account is a prerequisite for being considered a relevant social being, when a child’s entire class is online. 

Of course, that’s less a benefit of social media, and a demand imposed by the ubiquity of social media use among children. 

I won’t spend too much time on the harms of social media, since those should be eminently obvious. In short: Giving a child social media is the equivalent of opening up their bedroom window and yelling down the street, “Would anyone like to come in for an unsupervised visit?” 

“We believe that bans are ineffective,” a Reform UK spokesperson told Politico. Reform UK is nominally right-wing, but has done little to stop the country from sliding into terminal gay race communism. 

Anyhow, the hour is late for principled objections to “bans.” There is no general right to freedom of speech in the United Kingdom, a fact which the British government has thoroughly exploited. 

UK IS NUMBER ONE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA ARRESTS

12,000 in one year alone

Above China and Russia

We have no freedom of speech pic.twitter.com/51xt0SnpFW

— Basil the Great (@BasilTheGreat) November 1, 2025

Videos of British police officers allegedly visiting Brits to inquire into their social media use are abundant.

One man reportedly wrote the letter ‘N,’ with the intention of writing “No.” 

“Right now, you are my suspect in this crime,” a man, presumably a law enforcement officer, says over the phone. 

“We’re asking you to come down to the police station voluntarily,” a man says in another video, referencing the cameraman’s Facebook posts. 

Cumbria Constabulary, a police department in Penrith, has Britain’s highest social media arrest rate per capita, according to the Daily Mail.

The department had an “arrest rate of 42.5 per 100,000 population (217 arrests) in 2024, 20 times higher than Staffordshire Police’s low rate of 2.1 (21 arrests).” 

“Gwent Police came second with a rate of 33.9, a total of 204 arrests.” 

The Daily Mail reports that “thousands of people have been detained and questioned for sending messages that simply cause annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety to others.”

Total arrests for social media use “fell to 9,700 last year from a record high of 13,800 in 2023, but remain higher than pre-pandemic levels,” according to the Daily Mail. 

Good to see the British focusing on the important stuff, instead of the swaths of middle eastern Muslim men terrorizing their little girls. Thousands of British girls have been assaulted in the past decades by migrants. Many of the rapists were never caught. Many were handed relatively light sentences. (RELATED: ‘Treated As A Slave’: Horrifying Details Emerge About Massive UK Rape Scandal) 

For what it’s worth, I’d rather parents care enough about their children to not give them phones in the first place. But I appreciate that that’s a task made difficult by schools which mandate laptop use as part of their curriculum, and by the social exclusion inflicted upon children without phones. And by parents who just don’t care. 

Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatSandovalDC