Said it before, but to reiterate:
"Ban social media for under 16s"
"internet-free phones for children"
These ideas may have worked 20 years ago, but that horse bolted so long ago, it's galloped around the planet and is now approaching the stable from the opposite direction
/1
19 years ago I was an IT Support Officer in an FE college library. The shared PCs were constantly in use for Bebo. Against my advice, the powers that be wanted to ban it and arranged for it to be blocked. It took students less than 2 hours to get around the block. Scale that nationwide.
I remember at some point you could bypass my uni blocking software by opening the page in Google translate.
There were loads of dodgy (block bypassing) sites even back then.
I used to work at British Gas and the IT department kept telling us that we couldn’t get the internet on our PCs.
One time I was being told that with the BBC News homepage clearly visible behind me.
About the same time at school they banned stuff, you literal had to go to alta vista, search babel fish get the ip and boom back on stick death dot com
The digital skills of people tasked with teaching IT were so far behind mine when I was 13, 14 - whilst the "digital native" remains a waste of everyone's brainspace, so too is the idea that you can ban anything from anyone young and interested in it.
