The UK government has found the solution to child safety online: replace one form of unwanted content with another. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now demanding that Apple and Google activate built-in filters to stop children accessing sexually explicit images—a reasonable ask, until you realise what comes next.
The unstated trade-off is naked in its obviousness. Once the nudes are gone, the space vacated on children’s screens will not remain empty. It will fill with something equally designed to capture attention and drive behaviour: targeted advertising. Plush toys, energy drinks, the latest gaming subscription, trending fast fashion—all algorithmically selected to exploit the exact psychological vulnerabilities that explicit content exploits, just with better optics.
No one is arguing that children should see pornography. That is not the argument here. The argument is that Starmer’s framework treats the symptom while ignoring the disease: an entire digital ecosystem designed to monetise children’s attention. Blocking one category of exploitative content while leaving the infrastructure intact that enables exploitation is not child safety. It is corporate PR dressed up as policy.
Apple and Google will happily comply. They will activate parental controls, issue a press release about their commitment to protecting young people, and continue selling advertising space to the highest bidder. The government gets credit for action. Tech firms get a regulatory win. Children get a slightly cleaner feed of the same psychological manipulation, now with more sparkles.
This is what happens when policy is written by people who do not understand that the problem is not what children see—it is who profits from what they see, and how.