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July 8, 2026

Zero Knowledge, Full Record: Age Verification And The Infrastructure The Privacy Label Ignores

The “privacy-preserving age verification” label should be understood at two separate levels: on the one hand, it accurately describes a mechanism, yet on the other, it misleadingly describes a system. The protection it refers to covers a single exchange between a user and a website; the infrastructure that makes that exchange work requires knowing who the user is. The former may be preserving privacy, but the latter certainly doesn’t. That distinction has consequences. The label...

Blog Post, digital rights, technology
May 20, 2026

Don’t Be Fooled: What Australia Calls a Social Media Delay Is Actually a Triple Ban

The word "delay" is doing a great deal of work right now. Not only in Australia, but also in Brussels. On 12 May 2026, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressed the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children in Copenhagen. She called for action. She cited platform addiction, algorithmic harm, and the exposure of children to distressing content. The speech was substantive, and it landed. But it also contained a word choice that...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
May 6, 2026

Zlonk! What a Los Angeles Jury Found That Fifty Years of Research Could Not – Part 3

This is Part 3 of a three-part series. Part 1 examined the five-century history of media moral panics and why the smartphone debate fits that template imperfectly. Part 2 traced the engineering logic behind algorithmic feeds back to the television scheduling techniques of the 1970s and 1980s.  On 25 March 2026, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Meta and Google legally liable for the depression, body dysmorphia, and suicidal ideation suffered by a plaintiff...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
April 29, 2026

Zap! What Television Programmers Invented and Silicon Valley Perfected – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 examined the five-century history of media moral panics and why the smartphone debate fits that template imperfectly. Part 3 will look at what a US jury found that the science could not yet prove.  The accusation at the centre of the heavily publicised lawsuit against Meta and Google is that their platforms were deliberately engineered to be addictive, that this was known internally, and that...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
April 22, 2026

Kapow! Batman, Robin, and the template of moral panic – part 1

This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Part 2 will examine how the engineering logic of television scheduling became the algorithmic logic of social media feeds. Part 3 will look at what a US jury found that the science could not yet prove. Every generation convinces itself that its children are the first to be broken by a new medium. Every generation is wrong in roughly the same way. The debate over smartphones and...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
April 15, 2026

Is a (Social Media) Ban a Plan? We Built a Repository to Find Out.

The question has been ricocheting around European policy corridors for over a year. Australia banned social media for under-16s. France, Austria, Spain, Denmark, and Norway are moving in the same direction. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has declared that "parents, not algorithms, should be raising our children." And in Brussels, the word "ban" has acquired the quality of a policy position in itself: something that sounds decisive even when the evidence for...

Blog Post, digital rights, media lab
April 8, 2026

Turkey’s Social Media Ban: a Familiar Playbook With a Troubling Subtext

Turkey's parliament passed a law this week banning children under 15 from social media. Platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram will be required to block account creation for under-15s, install age-verification systems, and provide parental control tools. Platforms will have six months to comply. The law follows Australia, France, and others down a well-worn road. The child safety framing is sincere. The policy logic is not. What the law actually does The Turkish law amends...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
March 18, 2026

You’ve Been Murdoched: Australia’s Teen Ban Offers a Warning for Europe

Originally published on Tech Policy Press On March 5, the European Commission convened the first closed-door meeting of its special panel on child safety online, opened by President von der Leyen herself. Its recommendations, due by summer, will determine whether the EU should move toward harmonized age restrictions across twenty-seven member states. With France, Germany, Spain, Greece, and Denmark all mulling over national bans and the UK debating further age-restriction measures alongside its Online Safety Act framework, the cascade is accelerating. Before...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
February 18, 2026

Of Potatoes and Walls: A Generation Muted by Good Intentions

Last week, I found myself sitting around a table at the Lisbon Council, surrounded by policymakers, platform executives, children’s rights advocates and researchers, all wrestling with one question that has become the rallying cry of European digital policy: should we ban children from social media? It is a question that sounds decisive. Even bold. But as the conversation unfolded, a familiar album kept playing in my head. The event, a High-Level Working Lunch titled ‘To...

Blog Post, digital rights, European policy, internet policy, technology
January 28, 2026

The Leather-Wrapped Village: Why Social Media Bans Miss the Point

The leather-wrapped village is expanding. Australia just tried to wrap the world in leather, and now France has taken its first major step to join them. Europe should teach kids to wear shoes and make the road makers smooth the stones. And the UK? It is currently standing barefoot at the crossroads, deciding which path to take. When Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under sixteen in November 2024, the...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy, technology