The UK’s social media ban is doomed to fail
“Kids will get around it,” a prominent government official told Parliament.
Hello and welcome back. Many Glitchy things are afoot. Today we take a look at the strangeness of the UK’s social media ban, then ponder a future where our collaborative software will be fully private and encrypted. Plus much more, as usual. Enjoy, and let us know what you think!
Where there’s a will, there’s a way
When I was too young to drink or go clubbing, a boy in the year below me at school devised an ingenious way to fool bouncers’ ID checks.
He used a bit of acrylic paint and the delicate brushes designed for decorating tiny armies of monsters—he was a Warhammer fan—to alter people’s provisional driving licenses. One by one, he changed people’s birth years, meaning they would appear to be a year or two older (like so many scofflaws in the modern era, he was ultimately thwarted when a parent discovered his Facebook posts bragging about his exploits and informed the police).
When teens want to go “out out”, they will always find a way. The UK government, which in June moved to ban social media for under 16s, seemingly recognises this. But they still have a lot of work to do if they’re to make the internet meaningfully safer for British youths.
Late last year Australia became the first country to implement a nationwide under-16 social media ban, making it a flagbearer for the policy. However research has shown that around 80 percent of its teens are still using banned sites. A small portion of those reported that they had used a VPN to circumvent the ban—a tool that’s easy to download and install.
“I just want to be honest about this. Kids will get around it. Kids have always got around (laws against) smoking, drinking… we’ve all done it,” Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology in the UK said in Parliament on the day the ban was announced.
“Kids are savvy. But just because children get around these things, doesn’t mean we don’t have rules and boundaries. We’re trying to learn from Australia. We have to reset kids’ expectations,” she added.
Research on the recent volley of legislation banning under 16s from social media sites suggests safety features on major platforms are far from foolproof. A new report by the Cybersafety Research Center, a non-partisan multi-university group, and child safety nonprofit Heat Initiative lays out the problem—of the 86 safety features researchers tested across Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, 51 failed.
“Most features do not live up to the promises that companies make about the safety they provide,” it concludes.
Kendall said the government hasn’t yet set any targets or goals for compliance with the ban. She added that there will be more details coming this month on how the government intends to tackle the use of VPNs to access platforms.
“Many people want to use [VPNs] for privacy issues and I think that’s important. We know children use them, but I’m coming back to this in the consultation in July,” she said.
As it stands there is scant detail on whether the government intends to recommend technology that would also protect users’ data with tools like zero knowledge proofs. Requiring platforms or third party verifiers to collect personal and identifying data on users could create honeypots that present tempting targets for hackers.
Minors have been outsmarting adult boundaries since the dawn of the fake ID. A ban without a concrete plan for data privacy or verification may turn a generation into amateur network engineers—probably not the reset Kendall had in mind.—Lucy Harley McKeown
Here’s a Glitchy Thing
“Encrypted Spaces.” When Wired’s Andy Greenberg writes, I read. But one of his most recent stories describes a project that couldn’t live closer to the bullseye for Project Glitch: “The new open-source project could serve as the basis for a future of apps with features as complex as Slack, Discord, or Google Docs—but with added protection against surveillance,” he writes.
The team behind the project, called Encrypted Spaces, includes two former developers of Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging application. Back in 2019 and 2020, Nora Trapp, now at Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab, and Trevor Perrin, now an independent researcher, were working on a system that would make it possible for Signal’s servers to keep track of who is included in a group chat without needing to access any information about the members. They worked with researchers at Microsoft to build a system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to achieve this. Microsoft Research’s Greg Zaverucha, who helped develop that system, also helped create Encrypted Spaces.
Once they solved the group chat problem, they started thinking bigger, eventually landing on a question that inspired Encrypted Spaces, as Zaverucha said to Wired: “Why can’t we have end-to-end encryption in all the apps we use?”
The system they’ve come up with, which they describe in a whitepaper, relies on something called a “change log,” which is shared with an app on every user’s device. The change log keeps track of changes to the encrypted data set “so that each app can implement those changes locally and keep everyone’s version of the information synched and up to date,” Wired explains. Using zero-knowledge proofs, a server verifies to each device that new changes are correct, and that none are missing, without ever accessing the unencrypted data.
According to the whitepaper, the goal is “an efficient, general-purpose, and private-collaboration mechanism.” To achieve this, the team is “leverag(ing) recent advances in ZK proving systems” that have crystallized in recent years, in large part thanks to efforts to help blockchains process transactions faster. ZK rollups, for example, are a “layer 2” technology that bundles blockchain transactions and reduces them to a single, succinct proof, so the blockchain doesn’t have to process so much information. The “fast-forward” proof system the Encrypted Spaces team uses is similar to a ZK rollup, the researchers explain in the paper.
The team has released a “research preview” of the technology that includes a set of open-source code libraries. Their longer-term goal is to make it possible for developers to build encrypted apps without needing a highly specialized understanding of the underlying cryptography. “We want to make sure there’s no reason a developer wouldn’t want to make their application end-to-end encrypted, because it becomes so easy,” Trapp told Wired. —Mike Orcutt
ETC.
Catholics against CLARITY. In a letter to the leaders of the Senate Banking Committee, a Catholic organization called the Alliance to End Human Trafficking has raised concerns about certain language in the CLARITY Act, aka the crypto market structure bill.
The group specifically calls out “section 604” of the Senate Banking Committee’s latest draft of the bill, which is also known as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA). It stipulates that blockchain developers who do not control user funds “shall not be” treated as a money transmitting business under the Bank Secrecy Act as well as under so-called section 1960 of the US criminal code. (We’ve covered this issue in depth.) Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm was found guilty last year, under section 1960, of running an unlicensed money transmitting business—even though neither he nor his developers controlled user funds.
The letter argues that section 604 “could create broad carveouts and regulatory ambiguities that may make it more difficult to responsibly monitor illicit financial activity tied to trafficking, organized crime, child exploitation, sanctions evasion, and other forms of abuse.” It continues: “Responsible guardrails are not anti-innovation.” Meanwhile, crypto developers see the BRCA as a guardrail itself—against prosecutorial overreach.
“Lean Ethereum.” That’s what co-creator Vitalik Buterin is calling the next iteration of Ethereum, a project that he says will take three or four years. This is no small upgrade: “Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced,” he said in a recent tweet. He compared the impending shift to the “Merge,” a complicated upgrade in 2022 that switched the network from proof-of-work consensus to proof-of-stake. “Make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was second,” he said.
Core to the plan is to use zero-knowledge proofs to drastically reduce the amount of information that must be stored onchain, making it less expensive to run a validator. (Knock yourself out on the technical details here.) Buterin said the upgrade will also entail “replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum safe alternatives.”
Trump’s crypto number went up, and a million people lost their shirts. Recent financial disclosures have put US President Donald Trump’s crypto profits in the spotlight. But the losses incurred on the other side of his memecoin scheme are perhaps even more attention-grabbing. Launched shortly before Trump retook office in January 2025, $TRUMP peaked at over $75 per token, spurred in part by Trump’s own prompting on social media to buy the memecoin. As the New York Times reported over the weekend, the analytics firm Nansen found that 988,905 wallets that purchased $TRUMP have lost a total of $3.81 billion as the coin lost around 97 percent of its value.
The president, meanwhile, reported in an annual financial statement last week that his dealings in $TRUMP netted him $636 million in 2025, according to the Times (part of the reason for the profit is that transaction fees from the coin go to Trump’s holdings). Together with profits from World Liberty Financial, a company controlled in part by his sons that is behind the $WLFI token, Trump reported a little more than $1.4 billion in crypto income last year.
Some other Glitchy headlines 🐈⬛