A consensus is growing in Britain that social media has had a negative impact on young people, and that the Government should do more to help them. Research carried out earlier this year by More in Common shows majority support for raising the legal age for social media access from 13 to 16 in all age groups, including among Generation-Z respondents, who themselves grew up with smartphones.

Small wonder, then, that Digital Secretary Peter Kyle this week raised the possibility of a “social media watershed”, possibly modeled on TikTok’s introduction of 10pm curfews for under-16s and enhanced parental tools. For once, the Government could introduce a popular measure to address a problem that worries a majority of voters — including parents and teenagers themselves — without spending money.

Unfortunately, the evidence that social media is the cause of so many problems is inconclusive. As Professor Pete Etchells details in his 2024 book Unlocked, the effects of these platforms are not universally harmful, and vary enormously between individuals and contexts. A significant minority of the digital generations (one in five Millennials and almost a quarter of Gen Z) think social media’s impact on under-16s is positive.

In an age where so much social contact has moved online, teenagers naturally conduct much of their crucial peer interaction and identity-building through their smartphones. This has many drawbacks; but without change which moves that interaction back from cyberspace into real life, social media use is often countering rather than feeding loneliness and isolation.

Restricting social media access for under-16s would also be a difficult policy to implement. Even now, when the legal limit is supposedly 13, it is widely agreed that it’s very easy for under-13s to access social media. The 20-somethings of today got around parental rules by changing settings, using other devices and secret accounts, and generally being more tech-savvy than the adults. If today’s under-13s are successfully circumventing the law, it’s hard to think tomorrow’s 15-year-olds will have much trouble. After all, they’re essentially the same cohort, with years of practice getting around the law and adult rules.

The Online Safety Act’s requirements for age verification systems come into effect this summer, and social media companies will be among those enforcing legally-mandated checks on would-be users. Some platforms, including Instagram and Discord, have been experimenting with AI tools which predict a user’s age from their face, as an alternative to uploading photo ID. It’s essentially an AI version of the pub landlord or tobacconist looking you over before deciding whether to serve you without seeing a driving license.

The elephant in the room, of course, is universal digital ID, so any one of us can verify that we’re old enough to access age-limited content online. The potential price of protecting children from adult content online is that users consent to identify themselves — not just as adults, but as themselves in particular. There are obvious downsides to this, such as data leaks. People who use their digital ID to access sexually explicit material, for instance, could find their private proclivities made public, or used for blackmail.

Biometric digital ID, either run or licensed by governments, also makes citizens potentially transparent to the state in all their online interactions. Whatever one thinks of a current government’s benign intentions, it’s easy to imagine a change in administration bringing in less comfortable surveillance regimes.

Would UK citizens be prepared to “carry” Government digital ID as the price of raising the age of social media access to 16?  A majority say yes. As ever, offering to protect the electorate and their children is the easiest way to gain consent for more state power. A “social media watershed” would be just one step in this process.

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Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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