The Spanish Government’s measure is not good for minors, but above all, it is bad for adults, as it strips away privacy, prevents anonymity, and exposes them to increased cybercrime.
Article by Álvaro Martínez, president of the associació Protecció de la frontera electrònica, originally published in Catalan at Catalan magazine Crític.
A significant number of engineers, interaction and graphic designers, product managers, and people coming from the field of Psychology and adjacent areas have the daily goal of improving the persuasive design of social media interfaces. The key here is the concept of «improving.» Improving to optimize what, and with what goal?
The answer is: to improve the metrics that matter to advertisers, who are the ones footing the bill. The concept and visual aspect of notifications are optimized to maximize the manipulation of visual and cognitive attention, so that if you have left it, you enter the app again. The auto-play of videos overrides the principle of user autonomy and pushes negative content and hate speech, which is highly profitable for social media advertising (as La Quadrature du Net explains), which is why all recommendation algorithms tend toward it and spur on fake news.
In 2019, Meta, the owner of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, tried hiding the «like» counter on user posts. It didn’t hide them always, but sometimes, as a test, with the explicit intention of reducing anxiety. Subsequent analysis (which eventually became public due to legal proceedings) indicated that eliminating this metric reduced metrics interesting to advertisers (general engagement), so Meta decided that hiding it would become optional, rather than default.
A sharp government with a sincere concern for the well-being of the population would have found a clue of incalculable value in this backtracking. Two key conclusions here: first, social media companies will always prioritize advertising revenue, even when the balance between revenue and mental health shifts only very slightly toward well-being; and second, hiding «likes» is effective in minimizing negative social comparison. Prohibiting the display of this metric is within the reach of governments, but doing so would harm the advertising market.
A market as powerful and important as social media and the well-being of the population have conflicting interests. Every optimization made to improve metrics that advertisers value—time spent, visibility, commitment to certain content, etc.—is born from interface and experience designs that maximize revenue by promoting obsessive behaviors, making disconnection difficult, annoying you, and thus getting you hooked.
This is a problem for the population as a whole, of course, but very specifically for minors. Social media companies have more interest in adults being part of their user base immediately than minors, in the sense that adults usually have more purchasing power, and this is eminently an advertising business. But that doesn’t mean the tentacles of these strategies don’t reach minors, and even less so that they don’t affect them in a particularly harsh way.
It is evident that we must look for ways to protect the health and well-being of the adults of the future and of young people. Yesterday, the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced that Spain will prohibit access to social media for those under 16 years of age. The question, then, lies not in whether it is a necessary measure, but whether it is appropriate, responsible, proportionate, and effective.
The least restrictive option available must be used to achieve the protection of minors
The measure of prohibiting the entire population under a certain age from accessing a specific tool isn’t bad because the place they are barred from is an idyllic oasis without problems; it is bad because, in addition to being ineffective, it is an obstacle to the exercise of certain rights that could be protected—and the same goal achieved—through measures of a different nature.
The Australian Human Rights Commission, a body that depends financially on the Australian Government but is independent regarding its explainer, identifies the risk that measures such as banning access to social media for minors of a certain age infringe upon freedom of expression and access to information, freedom of association, and rights to culture, education, play, and development, among others.
It is difficult to think that the Commission says this because it believes social media is the pinnacle of education, information, and play: in the same explainer, the organization also identifies that the problem exists and that a solution focused on prohibition would, in isolation, have some positive consequences which society is much in need of, such as helping teachers or parents set limits with greater authority.
What concerns the Human Rights Commission is that «hile a ban may help to protect children and young people from online harms, it will also limit important human rights,» therefore «If there are less restrictive options available to achieve the aim of protecting children from harm, they should be preferred over a blanket ban.» The Australian case is very interesting because the ban on access for those under 16 to social media is already in force there.
The question is: are there alternatives? The text itself points to one of many: «Introducing a statutory duty of care [against social media companies] would be a proactive way to increase the accountability of social media companies and improve online safety for everybody.» This is in line with General Comment No. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment by the United Nations, which also recognizes, of course, that the problem exists, but demands that it be treated in a proportionate manner that does not discriminate against a part of the population regarding access to a tool that, while having its risks, also has the potential to favor communication and the exchange of ideas.
In a similar vein, given that the entire capacity of social media to cause harm derives from the communicating vessels of «metrics advertisers want» versus «population well-being,» another thing the Government could do is ban so-called dark patterns, that is, social media interface elements specifically designed to deceive or manipulate users so they take actions that might be contrary to their interests: auto-play, showing «likes,» making it difficult to unsubscribe from a social network, algorithmic content recommendations that spread fake news, etc.
In the European law known as the DSA, the acronym for the Digital Services Act, Europe already prohibits these practices, very timidly and very insufficiently, but only in the realm of online stores and not in all cases. Doing an equivalent thing for social media would make the dissemination of fake news disappear completely. By placing user preferences at the center, there would be no perceived loss of functionality: social networks could continue to have recommenders, only explicitly linked to what the user chooses and not to what angers the most or is most flashy. And, furthermore, it would allow the continued use of social media as a space for access to information and conversation. Unfortunately, companies with online stores sell a physical product or service and not advertising, and therefore, the advertising market would be much more damaged by the measure: this is surely the reason why governments do not legislate along these lines, and prefer ultra-restrictive and ineffective, but very popular, measures.
With all that said, it may seem exaggerated to label social media as a place with positive aspects, even with necessary nuances. It is a understandable worry, especially when observing what they have become and what kind of behaviors and discourses they amplify. Faced with this, there are two fundamental things to keep in mind: what we talk about when we talk about social media, and to what extent they don’t already have so much power that a part of public discourse circulates there.
The Spanish Government’s proposal to prevent access for those under 16 is not published, and therefore, we cannot know what definition of «social network» they intend to use. But, in a broader sense, the legislative branch has been working to regulate the internet for many years, and we can have an initial idea of what they are attempting to legislate.
Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828 has a name so long that, to avoid running out of breath, it is often popularly called the Digital Markets Act, or DMA. Until now, the current Spanish Government has shown complete identification and adherence to internet regulation laws coming from Europe. According to this Law, a social network is any «platform that enables end users to connect and communicate with each other, share content and discover other users and content across multiple devices and, in particular, via chats, posts, videos and recommendations.»
Given this definition, any doubt about whether a measure like the one proposed could be harmful or not is largely dispelled: just see the case of the United Kingdom, where they already have a recently approved law and the Government intends to apply it to Wikipedia. It hasn’t been put into practice 100% with Wikipedia yet because it is in an administrative and judicial process.
On the other hand, social networks are so omnipresent that people share notes on Facebook, use Telegram to repair bicycles, and read press headlines from a publication funded by the Catalan Government on Instagram. Preventing by law access to all this information for a significant subset of the population would only make sense if it were truly the only alternative, and that is not the case.
Some people come out even more harmed than others
For sexual and gender options historically situated by society as outside the norm, the web has operated on some occasions as a refuge, especially for those people living in less populated areas. The Brookings Institution or researcher Mariel Povolny, from the Columbia SIPA Institute of Global Politics are two of the names that have written detailed analyses on how age verification laws to access the internet are disproportionately affecting the population with dissident gender and sexual identities.
Similar to how refugees suffer digital exclusion in countries that require government documentation to register a SIM card, as happens in Spain, stateless persons or those in an irregular administrative situation receive the consequences of laws of this type disproportionately, because they cannot accredit their age.
The Spanish Government seeks internet surveillance and censorship from all fronts
If a measure is necessary, but this specific measure is so harmful, why is it proposed? This is the point where the suspicion arises that the declared intention regarding the problem this law addresses and the real intention are on different paths.
The Spanish Government’s initiative to prevent access to social media for those under 16 is not isolated internationally or legislatively, and is sheltered by other legal initiatives such as the censorship of the internet every weekend by order of LaLiga or the European initiative ChatControl. These are projects framed within a set of initiatives that, with varying degrees of success from the perspective of the rulers, have been launched in recent years in different states and very particularly in Spain.
In the summer of 2024, the Spanish State Government announced the «Cartera Digital Beta» project in a testing phase. It was a system designed for adult visitors to legal pornographic websites: upon entering, the website would have to show a QR code that the user would have to scan with their mobile phone and a government application, which would start an age verification system passing through the use of a certificate. Therefore, ultimately, it is data from the identity document that the Spanish Government issues, and this confirms the age. Once the age is confirmed, the user would be «authorized» for that specific «access.» Curiously, the number of times a user was allowed to do this was formally unlimited, but authorization had to be requested for a kind of «pass» of limited accesses that would be renewed indefinitely.
This proposal has not prospered (for now): companies that have mobile app markets did not want to publish something in the testing phase; the affected industry resisted, and there was much opposition and protest in the media. But it does evidence a pattern: the Spanish Government seeks ways to put an end to anonymity on the internet, with different excuses each time, but excuses very well elaborated, and all born in areas where they will garner significant support.
The proposal for mandatory age verification to enter social networks claims to be intended for minors, but it is addressed to adults. Age verification systems are, de facto, mass surveillance systems. To distinguish a minor under 16 from an adult, the platform is not satisfied with a checkbox (easily falsifiable) and needs solid proof. It implies obliging all citizens to hand over their identity document, passport, credit cards, or even facial biometric data to private technology companies or verification intermediaries and, in fact, the precedent of «Cartera Digital Beta» allows us to glimpse that the proposal goes in this line: involving certification services like the Fabrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre (Spanish state-wide public mint) and Government identification mechanisms.
With such a measure, an irrevocable link is created between a person’s real civil identity and their browsing history, and potentially other data, such as their «likes» and interactions. Also, and inevitably, centralized databases of extremely high value are generated containing the identity documents of millions of citizens, and this turns these companies into tempting and priority targets for cybercriminals.
It’s not that governments don’t know this risk exists: they know it perfectly well; in fact, just today it became known that a cyberattack managed to leak data of those registered in the Barcelona Affordable Housing Pool of the Barcelona City Council to criminals. What happens is that governments prefer to put an end to anonymity on the internet, a realm they think they do not control, far above the risks that the mechanisms to achieve this introduce.
Another conversation would be whether it is necessary to end anonymity on the internet. There are those who are in favor. Anonymity is a tool that has historically protected dissent and debate: newspaper editorials, where the opinion is signed by a collective to distance reprisals against the authors, is a prominent example. Although, like everything, it has its risks, the one who certainly does not want anonymity is the one who has power, that is, the one who has the capacity to retaliate against someone: they want to be able to always find who is responsible for certain opinions, for certain words.
The measure is not good for minors: the example of Wikipedia in the UK is evident testimony, and the fears of the Australian Human Rights Commission confirm it. But above all, it is bad for adults, due to its direct and indirect consequences. Directly, it strips privacy from adults, prevents their anonymity, and exposes them to more cybercrime. Indirectly, it dirties public discussion because it takes advantage of a real and urgent problem, the protection of the health and well-being of minors, for an ulterior motive.