A little Monday morning rant to warm me up for the week.
Born Crotchety
I spoke with The National about the proposed UK social media ban for teenagers. That’s an archive link due to their unfortunate adwall.
There’s nothing I offered in my delightfully crotchety comments that I wasn’t already saying four, five, six, and seven years ago, but if anyone had listened to me four, five, six, and se- oh you know what, forget it.
As with everything, the Dog/Car article I wrote last year is the backgrounder to my comments.
Magical thinking about magical thinking
The late and much-missed Ross Anderson famously wrote: “The idea that complex social problems are amenable to cheap technical solutions is the siren song of the software salesman and has lured many a gullible government department on to the rocks.”
Keen listeners may have also heard Ross yesterday, from wherever he resides in the great beyond, bellowing out to the great dominions: oh for fuck’s sake.
This being why:
Fun fact: the magical child safety solution which Jess Philips cited in her resignation letter is a vendor-specific offering, which benefited from an intense PR and lobbying campaign, and was previously praised by …
Prince Andrew.
I always keep the receipts.
heatherburns.tech/2026/02/20/t…
— Heather Burns (@heatherburnstech.bsky.social) 12 May 2026 at 14:46
That’s a thread, by the way.
Yes, the UK is now entering its tenth straight year of Brexit-era psychodrama, but even by those standards, this incident was remarkable for two reasons.
The first is that on her way out the door, a serving minister essentially regurgitated a private vendor’s sales pitch, a vendor whose years of aggressive marketing and corporate lobbying – not to mention courtship of The Nonce Formerly Known As Prince Andrew – placed them so close to power that their pitch deck was taken as both technical fact and regulatory assurance.
In doing so, it gave the wider public the sense of the magical thinking that those of us in the civil society space have been hitting up against for years. These years when we were portrayed as enemies of children’s safety for pointing out the obvious. These years when we would leave a frustrating meeting with a VIP policymaker thinking “where did she get those ideas from?” and realise that a compliance software vendor got to her before we did. That vendor promised her cheap technical solutions to complex social problems; you, on the other hand, gave her more problems. That’s why things are where they are.
Thanks to that letter, the wider world can see that now.
And that’s the second reason that incident was remarkable.
That’s because, at this point in the game, there was no excuse for it.
These are not the techno-optimistic days of the green and white papers which became the OSA, nor the regulatory-optimistic days of “taking back control” by wiggling out of the EU-derived, human rights-based Digital Single Market framework.
No, we’re way, way, way beyond that now. Things are different. Technology is different. Geopolitics are different. The open internet, or what’s left of it, is different.
Everything has changed.
There were, and are, people in civil society who have devoted years of their careers trying to explain that to government and to Parliament, and who either gave up trying or gave up their careers entirely when their funding was cut in favour of AI hype.
Despite all that, there still are people in civil society who still would have been happy to explain that to government and to Parliament, and to do so with nothing more than a phonecall. As before, they’d have brought stats. They’d have brought reports. They’d have brought legal briefings. They’d have brought the optimism that no vendor’s slick sales pitch can diminish.
Didn’t happen, of course.
And so there it is, on Parliamentary letterhead.
Magical thinking about magical thinking.
Here’s a fun fact for a postscript: I have written two blog posts about my encounters with age verification software providers who were seeking to normalise the implementation of their products into the British internet stack, while also lobbying politicians to expand the legal framework from mere age verification to requiring government ID proofs of citizenship as conditions for website access. In both posts, both sets of editors required me to edit out the narratives of how openly racist the age verification providers were – as in, my accounts of how they were blatantly seeking to leverage the Online Safety Act to use their products to restrict ethnic, racial, and national minorities from being able to access the web – so that the editors didn’t get sued over the articles. That doesn’t change the fact that those conversations happened. That doesn’t change who those vendors are, what they really believe, and what they really want.
The language is leaving me
Social Media is Now Parasocial Media
In the interest of the power of naming things, I love this short open-access paper from danah boyd where she suggests shifting the term we use to describe social media.
As she explains, the term “social media” is a hangover from a more optimistic time when these sites were nodes for authentic human connections. We are now light years beyond that: these sites are nodes for AI scrapers, gamed algorithms, and monetised content. They exist solely to exploit and to harm. The authentic human connections, at least on those applications, are long gone.
Hence renaming it parasocial media, as a phenomenon which “creates the conditions for people to objectify one another at a distance as mediatized objects, helping realize the different layers of toxicity that social media scholars document.”
And she is right: we are no longer watching each other on these sites. We are watching depictions of each other, as filtered through machines.
Got a thing
Although classes ended last April, my dissertation was submitted in September, and my MSc was confirmed in December, the nature of the university graduation queue meant that I didn’t get my actual degree until last week.
And there it is. Read More
Development is political
If I was still in my conference speaking era (ha), I’d say this:
Testing your inputs can be an act of resistance.
Not testing your inputs can be an act of collaboration.
I, Sisyphus
Banning children from VPNs and social media will erode adults’ privacy
I spoke with New Scientist about a handful of clauses in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently reaching the finish line of the Parliamentary process. These clauses are resurrecting several incredibly bad ideas which were debated out of the Online Safety Act, a good four or five years ago.
There are very good reasons that those clauses, and their unintended consequences, were taken out of the then-Bill.
But here we are, all these years later, seeing those bad ideas smashed with brute force into a completely separate bill.
The Prince, The Paedo, The Palace, and the “Safety Tech” app
I have two skills in my professional locker which are both very useful and which also cause me a lot of trouble.
One of those skills is a photographic memory, which I’ve had since primary school. If I am scratching away at a policy question, I can remember a verbatim passage from a book I read years ago, and I can also remember that it was on the top half of a left hand page. I don’t understand it. It just is.
The other skill is an uncanny inner radar for charlatans, chancers, shysters, grifters, hustlers, and (as per previous blog entries…) actual criminal predators. Even when it’s years before The Stories come out or The Revelations are revealed, I will find myself looking at the centre of attention, being the only person in the room who not is applauding them like a seal, because I’m thinking to myself what’s your story, morning glory. I don’t understand it. It just is.
What I do understand is why these skills are why I have spent my adult professional life being labelled “difficult”, often at the cost of the professional work itself. Over time you come to learn that “difficult” means “person who remembers everything and sees right through your bullshit”. Which is why I tend to wear “difficult” as a badge of pride.
Well.
In light of various dramatic news events this week, I must report that once again, without even trying or knowing The Stories, I spotted one from hundreds of miles away, and I remembered where I kept the receipts.
the other Turing test
A few months ago I wrote a blog post which, as they do, went to the top of Hacker News. When this happens, I tend to ignore the commentary for my own sanity, but with that recent post, there was one observation a few people made which made me quite happy.
At last, a wonderful day in Parliament.
What an absolute honour and privilege it was to spend Wednesday morning in the House of Commons, alongside dissidents from Russia, Afghanistan, and China, speaking to Parliamentarians about the importance of end-to-end encryption.
The event, organised by Index on Censorship, was the most amazing, inspiring, and – here is the important point – politically effective gathering I’ve ever attended in the building. Hats off to Index for pulling it together.
Their campaign materials are excellent resources for further advocacy.
I have endured some right miserable days in the palace, so leaving with a smile on my face, knowing that good things had been done, felt amazing. But it wasn’t about me, of course. The three dissidents, who were so generous with their time and their words, are why we do this. It was humbling just to talk to them. This is why the work matters. This is what it’s all about.
Extra special thanks to Olga from Pussy Riot for doing me a massive favour. It was very much appreciated, by both the sender and the recipient. On an end-to-end encrypted app, of course.
I took this photo, I’m not in it!
Ukraine, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, America
As I mentioned in my 2025 reading roundup, I spent some time last year immersed in studying the international protocols which have been devised to collect, categorise, and preserve digital evidence of war crimes, and crimes against humanity, for use in future tribunals.
These are the standards which allow human rights defenders to ensure that the video of something horrible which somebody filmed on their phone – perhaps while they were just walking along, minding their own business – meets the standards needed for submission as legal evidence for the next Nurembergs, whilst being safely preserved long enough to make it there.
The result of this research, a final paper for one of my MSc courses, was the only essay I’ve ever written for which I needed to add a content warning, because rape is a weapon of war.
Although my research focused on Ukraine, I made the point that these protocols have been used in Syria, Sudan, and Yemen.
I now make the point that they also need to be used in America.
The Darnella test of social media and smartphone regulation
There’s a lot happening this week, very fast, in the political sphere, about banning social media for teenagers, or banning them from smartphones. I have plenty to say about that, but right now I want you all to focus on this part.
This is my personal touchstone for evaluating proposed regulation about social media, and/or smartphones, where teenagers are concerned. I call it the Darnella test.
Ok, so who’s Darnella?
She’s a fucking hero.