A proposed ban on social media for under-16s is at odds with the government’s own research showing most young people feel it helps them connect – while a horror film born from the internet’s darkest corners has just broken $300m at the global box office, raising questions about how effectively the UK can police the digital world.
The government has yet to explain how a British ban would actually work. Australia’s experience offers little reassurance: determined teenagers there are bypassing restrictions using VPNs or even drawing fake moustaches to fool age-verification software. “A law that cannot be enforced is a suboptimal law,” one observer noted.
“Government report shows 4 in 5 young people value social media, as ban faces enforcement doubts and creepypasta film booms”
Yet polling by Savanta for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology tells a more nuanced story. Four in five young people say social media helps them feel connected to others. Twice as many agreed with positive statements about it than negative ones. Even parents are on board: 42% agreed that, for their own child, the benefits outweigh the risks – compared with just 25% who thought the opposite. Both groups favour safety features such as time limits and restricting location sharing.
This debate unfolds as a new kind of internet-born horror, creepypasta, goes mainstream. The film Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons and released in May, has just surpassed $300m in box-office takings. It is based on a genre that emerged from 4chan in 2006, where users would copy-paste blocks of text – “copypasta” – and later “creepypasta” for scary stories. The film’s inspiration came from a 2002 photo of an empty furniture store, posted on a blog. In 2019, someone on 4chan asked for “disquieting images”, and that picture was one response.
Creepypastas are collaborative horror fictions that could only exist online: users post in-character, as if describing real events, and stories expand across message boards, wikis, videos and podcasts. They thrive on the glitchy, uncertain reproduction of information – a photo saved and reuploaded multiple times becomes distorted, perhaps deliberately tampered with, or maybe it’s an authentic document of something unnatural.
The contrast is sharp: the same internet that offers sanctuary and connection to young people also spawns these uncanny narratives. The government’s own report shows that twice as many young people have positive experiences as negative ones, but tragic deaths linked to social media have fuelled demands for action. As one commentator put it, the conversation is skewed: instead of trying to protect children from the internet, we should think about how to make it safer for everyone.