A Healthy Place To Be: What Law Cannot Build for Children on the Internet
This morning the UK government announced it will ban under-16s from social media, following Australia, which did the same in December. The UK says it will go further, with limits on stranger contact with children, on livestreaming and on AI chatbots, across a wider range of services.
The issue is real. When my older son founded a publishing house when he was four years old and his company required social media to communicate its work: I built a desktop tool so that my son could publish to all of his company's social media accounts without having to view those social media platforms at all.
For too long young people have been exposed to some of the most corrosive and destructive content. Whether it is vulnerable children being exposed to self-harm communities, or simply getting caught up in the divisive toxicity of modern politics. The existing social networks built their revenue streams on a currency of social interaction that incentivises scandal, horror and some of the most problematic forms of human behaviour. Social media has never been safe for adults, and has been very dangerous for children.
The diagnosis
Read the UK proposal and the Australia legislation closely and one feature decides everything. There is no parental-consent exemption. A parent cannot sign their child onto a prohibited platform, however carefully they would supervise. The duty sits on the platform to keep under-16s off. Australia's regime backs this with penalties up to nearly fifty million dollars and, deliberately, no exemption for the well-behaved account. The lawmakers understood something that the safety teams of the existing platforms have spent a decade pretending not to know: the harm is not a few bad users on a good system. The harm is the system.
The existing social networks are an engine for putting a child in front of strangers, in front of a feed where any danger may appear and inside a system where the user is treated as a product. You cannot make that safe with a setting, because the danger is not a setting. It is the nature of the place.
So the law does the only thing a law can do. It removes the child from the place. It does not, and cannot, build the better shape.
The age-gate
Watch what happens next. Every platform the new law will apply to will now bolt an age-gate onto a machine built to do the opposite of what the law wants. They will buy age-estimation, bolt on a verification step, and carry on. In fact, this has begun. As of last night, my Facebook and Instagram accounts are now locked - because my son's company's Instagram account supposedly violates their terms.
The architecture underneath does not change, because it cannot change without ceasing to be the product. The open feed, the stranger graph, the invented identity, the account the child holds beyond any parent's reach: all of it stays. A wall goes up at the door of a house designed to have no walls inside. The child is left outside.
This is the deeper problem the laws do not solve. Removing children from the open network leaves children outside of the public sphere. Critics are right to say that a ban alone treats the symptom. Had the social web been designed in the first place to be a productive and safe environment for children, perhaps we would not be here.
Supervision
I began conceptualising engage.re when I was nineteen, at the time I first started to use the internet. At that time I knew that what I was building needed great care, and a deep understanding for the world it would serve. Getting it right was the difference between a dangerous world and a good world. That's why I spent many years investigating, studying, prototyping, experimenting and gaining the kind of practical on-the-ground experience. I studied the internet, globalisation and the public sphere as an undergrad, MA and PhD. All my dissertations investigated and described aspects of what I was going to build. Many of the jobs I took, investigated this in other ways, in practical ways.
All of this helped me to understand the world in which the social web needed to be built. Now, engage.re is built, it is in production and it is online. Whilst most cannot yet sign into an account, anyone can register to a waiting list.
From a distance engage.re looks like another social network: profiles, posts, conversations, organisations. Look closer and it reverses the defects every platform shares. Identity is real, confirmed by both sides, not a line you typed about yourself. Your data is yours, each fact carrying its own visibility, set by you. Talk is tied to the world, communities of all scales huddled on materially and substantively problem solving the issues that matter to them. I describe this all in more depth in my article Machines of Human Grace. What I want to talk about in this paper is what we have built for children, and that is supervision. On engage.re child supervision is actual and accountable.
There are few cases in life when a person is truly under the responsibility of another. A child is one such example. A child is brought into the world by their parents, and the parents are responsible for educating a child to live in the world. They are responsible for keeping them safe from danger and, also, for giving them the opportunities to learn and grow.
On engage.re a child user can only be created by a parent, who is then accountable for them: the parent sets what the child may do, sees every action and interaction, and can freeze the account. The parent holds control and responsibility, and yet cannot put words in the child's mouth. Only the child speaks as the child. A child could keep their password secret from their parents. Yet the parent supervises and is accountable. One mechanism does the two things the industry has failed to do even under legal compulsion. It makes a child safe online, and it keeps the child sovereign while doing so.
Because that was the foundation we built, and not an afterthought. What the new laws demand are catching up with our design, not something we have to add. A child on engage.re reaches only the people and groups a parent has approved. Which feeds they can scroll, which people they can talk to, which actions they can take. The closed, supervised, known-contacts world that the UK law plans and that the Australian model implemented, is simply the default a child receives on our system.
Configurations of compliance
There is a reason we can meet a law announced this morning without writing new software for it, and the reason matters more than the laws do.
We did not build engage.re to satisfy the United Kingdom, or Australia, or any one regime. We built the capability because we deeply care about the role a parent plays in a child's life and the responsibility they hold towards them in having brought them into the world. By our framework, each country's rules are met simply by selecting a configuration. A child's experience is resolved from two verified facts: their age, and their jurisdiction. Those two facts determine which aspects of the child user experience are controlled by the platform (by law) and which are controlled by the parent. What is active, what surfaces renders and how tight the circle is drawn. The closed educational experience for an under-16 in Britain or Australia is one experience. In the USA, the child will have an experience driven only by parents. In all cases, the parent is ultimately supervising and responsible. Same platform, same data model, a different profile.
So a new law is not a rebuild, it is a configuration selection. When the next country legislates, and they will, in their own direction and on their own timetable, our system will already know how to obey it. The platforms bolting gates onto old houses are locking children out of their platforms. We solved the shape of the problem, and so our platform is open to children and a better online experience for children than they have ever been given before.
Institutions
Imagine a walled garden, in the old sense, before the phrase was spoiled by platforms that used it to mean a cage they owned. A real walled garden is not a prison. It is a place a child can run in freely precisely because someone responsible decided what is inside it. The wall is not there to keep the child small. It is there to keep out strangers and danger so the child can be free to explore, discover and learn in safety.
The gates of that garden are the institutions already in a child's life. A school. A homework club. A music school. A football team. A scout troop. A summer camp. A project addressing a local community issue managed by moderators facilitating action by children on that issue. These are not the open social network. They are the oldest and safest form of a child's wider world, and both laws are written to leave them alone. In combination, they constitute an online world of unlimited potential, in which a child can engage with friends from across many different networks in many different settings. Yet, not open. Each supervised.
What's more, on engage.re each of these networks can run its own app: closed, supervised, the school talking to its own pupils and families and no one else. The child participates in that space only because a parent approved that institution into the child's circle, and that approval is the consent. The institution sees its own corner and nothing more. It never becomes the child's guardian. That remains the parent's, and only the parent's.
Seeing
Safety and supervision are the baseline of the better place. But once a child is safe, the question becomes what the child can do there, and what the child can see.
A child becomes a person by acting on the world and watching what follows. Do something, see what it changed, then do it again differently. Just as it is for adults, that loop is how a child learns that they are an agent of change, that effort connects to outcome, that what they do as a being in the world can have real consequence. It is among the most important things a childhood builds. It does not switch on at sixteen. It is learned throughout childhood.
The open network gave a child the reverse, and this is where its danger lives. The networks craved one thing only: engagement. They are blind to problem solving, blind to agency and mute to consequence. So when a child scrolls, the system answers with whatever holds attention, and what holds attention is so often what harms: the pile-on, the self-harm spiral, the stranger who flatters or falsifies reality, the feed that rewards cruelty because cruelty performs. Our existing networks do not distinguish whether a child is flourishing or a child is being corrodified. They are designed to manufacture engagement. The blindness is not a flaw sitting beside the danger. The blindness is the danger. It was never safe for adults for that same reason. It is worse for a child, who is still learning what the world is, from a system that cannot see the child at all.
engage.re is built to see. Every fact on it is bound to a concept, so it registers when something real changes: litter cleared from a road, the books a class has read, a fund a neighbourhood has raised, the state of a park a club has taken on, a peer mentoring network ensuring no child is left behind. A child working on a real issue, in a project a parent approved, can see the consequences of their actions, and how much of what changed came from what they actually did. Not a number that flatters. A change in the world, measured, on anonymised aggregates that ensure data sovereignty for all. A child grows up able to see whether what they do works, which is the same sight an adult needs to ensure the society in which they live is accountable to itself.
Laws can take a child out of a harmful place. It cannot give a child a good one. That has always been the limit of policy. What we have built is the practical shape of the better place. If you run a school, a club, or a camp, build your app with us, through ESRE, and give the children in your care a digital space they can use in safety.
If you are a parent, you can join the waiting list. Introduce us to your children's institutions so that we can help them build a safe place for your children. And when your child's school or club builds with us, the account to manage that relationship will already be yours.
Built one healthy place at a time: the people who build those places are the institutions that you already trust, and you the parent are the one to provide a key for your child to enter.