When the soon-to-be ex-British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, told the nation last week that a full social media ban for all under-16s from social media was “the right choice" for the country, a group of people was watching closely, and thinking about what to do next.
For them, policies like these are problematic. They require all users (adults included) to undergo mandatory age verification checks. That means face scanning or ID document sharing to prove that any user is old enough to access content and social media services – and that’s something that privacy advocates and technologists have long warned is "a cybersecurity disaster waiting to happen".
But for this group, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, it’s your face they’ll want to scan. Tomorrow, it’ll be your messages.
So, after a social media ban in Australia, the development of Canada’s Bill C-22, the expansion of mandatory age verification in Europe, the EU's Chat Control debate, and discussions on children’s online safety proposals in the US Congress, the UK’s announcement was the final straw
On June 16, 2026, just 24 hours after Starmer's speech, that the Stop Killing the Internet campaign was officially unveiled with its mission to defend the open internet against state policies that could trigger mass surveillance and excessive control.
"Any restriction that restricts people's human rights and right to access the open internet is what we're opposed to,” Programme Manager at the Open Rights Group (ORG), James Baker, told TechRadar.
The ORG is just one of many high-profile UK digital rights groups that have come together to form Stop Killing the Internet, along with Big Brother Watch, and Index of Censorship. They are calling to arms other worldwide organizations committed to finding rights-based solutions to online social problems to join in.
“We hope to expand globally because it affects people in all countries, including places like India or China, where the internet is a lot more restricted."
Ahead of the launch, Baker and the rest of the group have already held urgent meetings with over 20 organizations, listened to the perspective of young people about the UK's proposed teen social media ban, and decided it was time to take action.
Stop Killing the Internet was formed as a sister campaign of Stop Killing Games, a movement created by the gaming community to advocate for legal protections to prevent publishers from shutting down video games.
But why have gamers joined forces with digital rights advocates to challenge ongoing children's online safety policies? And, most importantly, which solutions is the group proposing instead?
Why restricting the internet for teens is a bad idea
We can divide children's online safety policies into two main strands — each has its critics warning of dangerous unintended consequences.
The first are access barriers which cut children off from online spaces and content thought to be unsuitable for their age.
Policymakers first started by barring children from adult-only sites with age verification checks. Then came total platform blocks such as Australia's world-first under-16s social media ban, which the likes of the UK, France, Malaysia, and other countries are also looking to follow.
Baker believes that, ultimately, these bans won't work — an idea backed up by recent data from Australia — but it’s the nature of the approach that bothers the ORG’s Programme Manager.
"If there was rowdy behavior or a fight in a town hall or a public square, you'd try to police it and solve it — you wouldn't completely shut down the space for everyone,” he said.
“Yet the response to internet problems is to try to shut down the space and exclude people based on their age."
The second group of child protection policies focuses on content scanning.
An example here is Keir Starmer's ultimatum to Big Tech to find a way to prevent children from accessing explicit images on their devices. It's a plan that so unpalatable from a privacy perspective that it prompted private messaging platform Signal to say that it "would rather exit the market than undermine the technical guarantees that people trust for their privacy".
Content scanning is an old idea that continues to arise on lawmaker agendas and, often, fails to translate into actual legislation.
One incarnation of this client-side scanning was initially part of the UK's original Online Safety Act, but it was halted until "it's technically feasible to do so" in a privacy-respecting manner. And there's been no mention of it since, with regard to OSA, most likely because it's easily said by politicians but next to impossible in practice.
In the EU, another message scanning movement, commonly referred to as Chat Control — the nickname for the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) proposal — has been in negotiations for over three years and still there's no final text that's convincing enough for privacy experts to accept.
In reality, though, according to Stop Killing Games' Strategy Lead Moritz Katzner, all of these copycat policies, wherever they are in the world, have very little to do with child safety at all.
"You have to seriously ask if this is actually about protecting children. As someone who was recently part of that demographic, I do not believe them, because they did not care about me, nor my gaming communities, for a very long time," he told TechRadar.
Katzner explains that a crucial part of the Stop Killing the Internet campaign is indeed making people understand that there is no difference between chat control, age verification, and ID verification.
"They are all reasoned from the same agenda," he said. "It is an escalation ladder where they start by scanning your face, then require ID, and eventually start scanning your chats."
How Stop Killing the Internet plans to reset the debate
For the people involved in Stop Killing the Internet, it's a non-negotiable — what's needed to protect both children and the open web is to shift the focus of the online safety debate.
"Our primary goal is to force a hard reset of the debate,” said Katzner. “To do so, we should listen to what experts have been saying for three decades and look at the algorithms, because these platforms are addictive to adults, too."
And how do they plan to do that?
Stop Killing the Internet aims to make the knowledge of academics, computer scientists, civil societies, and other experts, mainstream directly via social media content creators. This strategy would allow them to bypass mainstream media, which, they believe, has mostly failed to critically report on this issue.
An important goal of the movement is to expose the global network of funding that they say backs up these laws. According to Katzner, it's vital to make a clear distinction between genuine advocacy and corporate lobbyism.
"Meta spent millions in the US and UK lobbying for platform-level age verification because it serves their interests, and politicians are being misused in this process," he said.
While Big Tech plays hot potato with the responsibility of children's safety, how the laws land make a huge bearing on the likes of the gaming community, according to Katzner. Gaming platforms are also included in age verification and social ban policies. Yet, as Katzner explains, there's also a tactical reason for Stop Killing Games to be involved in this fight.
Stop Killing Games has material successes in its fight to date. It brought its cause to the political agenda and helped the Protect Our Games Act to pass California’s Assembly vote — as reported by The Guardian.
“We are now bringing the strong muscle of online communities into this campaign," Katzner added, with reference to the broader internet freedom fight.
What's next for Stop Killing the Internet?
While Stop Killing The Internet is expected to fully launch on June 27, 2026, — and reveal all the people involved — Baker from Open Rights Group said that it has already attracted interest from organizations and individuals from Australia, Canada, the United States, Africa, and Europe.
In the coming days, we will also know what the movement's first step will look like.
What's certain, however, is that the problems with children's online safety policies are only its starting point — the goal is to save a free and open internet from all forms of online restrictions.
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