29.01.2026
Freedom comes with thorns
Australia has done it, France has done it too, the Tory frontbench and teaching unions want to do it, the government might do it. They all want to ban under-16s using social media. But should we go along with such kneejerk draconian restrictions? We certainly should not, argues Baris Graham
In the last few months, the proportionate increase of accusations in the press against social media and general internet usage in relation to ‘online harm’ and the ‘mental health of young people’ has reached a definite tipping point. Of course, anyone who knows the bandwagon tendency of the rightwing media and their hand-wringing centre-left alter egos, will know the kneejerk reaction to any social problem: bans, state control and clampdowns.
You only need to type in your browser the web address of the Daily Mail - or, for the pearl-clutching audience, The Guardian - to see headlines mentioning the latest ‘expert’ banging drums about ‘mental health’ or a minister extolling the virtues of the Online Safety Act.1 Of course, what I intend to do in this article is not brush away any concern you might have with the online world and its negatives - a matter, I believe, Scott Evans covered well in his recent Weekly Worker article2 - but to examine why these matters are at the forefront now, when one could produce similar claims of the same intensity five years ago. Who is the establishment blaming, when these panopticon-like measures are being introduced, and why are they actually doing it?
The position of the Weekly Worker has been defiantly clear, when it comes to the regulation of speech and expression, including state oversight and restriction: we are against it - not least because, the greater the power a bourgeois government has to regulate life, the more it can use such power to impose restrictions on forces hostile to it (not least working class militants and Marxists), but also because, as Engels put it in 1865, “Without these freedoms [the proletariat] will be unable to move freely itself; in this struggle it is fighting to establish the environment necessary for its existence, for the air it needs to breathe.”3
Not a class
Of course, children and under 16s do not constitute a class. But the majority of them are working class, ie proletarian. They are born of working class parents and will become sellers of labour power. Nonetheless, while we favour protective legislation - that almost goes without saying - we also recognise that children and young people should, themselves, actively participate in their passage to adulthood as self-making individuals. That should happen in school, at home, in society … and online. Hence we favour empowerment, not treating them as somehow being born outside history, outside capitalism with all its commercialised horrors and perverted values. As with adults the answer lies in organisation … and building an alternative culture that exist within capitalism but also points beyond capitalism.
Hence, we want to radically transform what passes for ‘education’. Schools should not be police-guarded prison houses dedicated to achieving exam results and imposing a suffocating liberal conformity. The arts, music, sports, creativity need to thrive (and not only in the better so-called public schools). Hand-in-hand with that there needs to be, yes, self organisation: school councils and unions, spaces and clubs of all kinds and discussion groups … and young communist leagues.
Of course, that comes with risks. The world is horrible and full or horrible people. Racist non-racists, sexist morons, nationalist demagogues, crazies of every kind and variety will push their values and ideas, not least on social platforms. Capitalists will certainly use every devise, every opportunity to make a fast buck. But you cannot have free development without the thorns.
Meanwhile, we have a tidal wave of laws, starting with the aforementioned Online Safety Act 2023, plus Australia’s and now France’s4 restrictions on youth in relation to social media, have been passed regulating internet platforms - and thus both large tech companies and individual internet users. But none of this should come as a surprise.
However, what surprise there is, as mentioned before, is why these measures are being taken now. There have been talks on ‘online harm’ from government mouthpieces, plus the spectacle of the mass media and the NGO bureaucratic complex, going back as far as the mid-2010s. However, these concerns are largely a product of the post-Covid era and have been written into law in a relatively short time … and in many countries too.
As certain people from the tech pseudo-libertarian sphere might claim, this is not merely because of some imagined or real technological illiteracy of national governments. Even if there are a million bureaucratic hoops and checks that legislation has to go through before it can be passed (as examples, such as the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 or the recent pollination of ‘AI safety’ legislation in national and supra-national legislation, show), governments still have far-reaching powers at their disposal to use as they see fit.
Now, the seemingly benign reasons governments have given for pushing the latest tranche of legislation have been focused on various forms of ‘online harm’. They include the atomisation of children, the encouragement of self-harming, ‘political radicalisation’, with a particular focus on young men embracing the racist far right … that and murderous misogynistic attitudes (with the recent TV series Adolescence5 providing a particular cultural mark on popular consciousness).
As previously stated, I do not think that this concern is totally unfounded - just as ‘hate speech’ legislation, which has been used to clamp down on expressions of solidarity with Palestine, does not mean that there is no actual hurtful and racist speech. Similarly, the state’s dictatorial regulation of online platforms and communication does not mean that the online world cannot have negative effects on people. But what is crucial is that people should not for a moment think that what goes over the heads of senior lawmakers and civil servants when drafting these laws is genuine concern for the safety of people and particularly children.
Two-faceted
There is a two-faceted issue here, when discussing why governments might suddenly jump at the opportunity to impose online regulations. Firstly, as careful business observers have noticed, the market value of big tech companies in indices such as Nasdaq are the highest they have ever been, with the surge in value especially marked since Covid and the ‘AI boom’.
This is a sector of the economy which has seen a stupendous expansion after the pandemic unlike any other, meaning that control over this sector is now considered more essential than ever. It should be no surprise, then, that in a period of history that many have dubbed “economically and geopolitically unstable”,6 governments - as players in a field contested by other governments, as well as economically and culturally influential corporations - are seeking to preserve and expand their power rather than risking the loss of their relative grip and their state capacity. That is to say, these measures are not a product of parliamentary gerontocrats who remain unaware of the internet’s key role, or government ministers passing legislation as part of a reaction to what constituents have been writing to them in response to the latest shock horror tragedy in the news, but a direct attack on the influence of tech corporations vis-à-vis that of national administrations.
The second, and somewhat simpler, facet of this is the ever-increasing clampdown on personal privacy in the face of mounting civil discontent and protest movements. On the ‘physical’ frontier, there already has been an increase in the use of various police forces around the world of technologies such as facial recognition - the Labour government has just announced such measures to be enforced over the whole of England and Wales.7
It is not surprising then that governments now wish to extend their possible use into the online world. The main focus of these measures has been on trying to essentially de-anonymise online users. Internet platforms usually already hold data associated with their users’ personal identity, such as IP addresses which can reveal their real-life location, or personal email addresses.
Secondly, and more odiously, however, are the measures to end, or ‘bypass’, end-to-end encryption - a cryptographic measure which allows users on the internet to communicate with each other completely anonymously (essentially the digital equivalent of speaking with someone in the privacy of your own home).
However, the potential effect of the internet on enabling not just individual, but mass, communication obviously prioritises this feature for policing and security organisations of many countries as something which should be suppressed. There already are measures in the Online Safety Act which, if the government wanted to enforce them, would allow it to restrict in the UK any provider of end-to-end encryption messaging,8 if it did not permit the government to bypass such measures, thus making them redundant (the EU also has plans to enact similar legislation9).
We communists must reiterate that we oppose any legislation or measure which bars people from expressing their views or which infringes on people’s right to privacy. Even with the common refrains from other leftists in mind - that opposing regulation in this instance means giving more power to the bourgeoisie, to Elon Musk (how dare you not protect people from harmful speech?) - there is a clear principle here that, in a society where governments operate as viceroys to the bourgeoisie and are dedicated primarily to the ultimate preservation of the current political and economic order, giving them an inch in terms of control means they could go a mile in terms of the preservation of their rule.
Do not be lured in the wrong direction by the bogey of online safety.
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For some recent examples, see Paul Demarty’s very good article, ‘No trust in the state’ (Weekly Worker January 15 2026: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1568/no-trust-in-the-state).↩︎
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‘How not to overcome anxiety and depression’ Weekly Worker January 8 2026: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1567/how-not-to-overcome-anxiety-and-depression.↩︎
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www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/france-social-media-ban-under-15s.↩︎
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www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/18/ban-smartphones-for-uk-under-16s-urges-adolescence-writer-jack-thorne.↩︎
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www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2022/729374/EPRS_STU(2022)729374_EN.pdf.↩︎
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www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-encryption-online-safety-bill.↩︎
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www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controversy-eus-chat-control-nears-its-final-hurdle-what-know.↩︎