Monsters vs Dinosaurs
Millennials everywhere will be familiar with the scene from Wall-E depicting future humans as sedentary, screen-addicted slobs. At the time, this felt mostly accurate, if perhaps a little too on the nose. A worst-case scenario that was unlikely to ever truly come to pass. Over the past few years, it has felt more like an inevitable prophecy.
The seemingly inexorable rise and self re-invention of social media, from the early days of Facebook to the unending reels of Instagram and TikTok, has led to at least two generations being chronically online. It is within this self-sustaining digital prison that most Millennials and Gen-Zers (with plenty of Gen-Xers and Boomers in the mix) have willingly incarcerated themselves, proffering up their minds as guinea pigs to the algorithmically relentless and data-ravenous monstrosities of Musk, Meta, and their ilk. And it’s been 17 years since Mark Zuckerberg, chairman & CEO of Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, adopted the phrase “move fast and break things”. Although this was made more palatable to investors in 2014 as “Move fast with stable infrastructure” (not quite the same ring, is it?), the crux remained: social media companies had to rapidly and constantly iterate, adapt, and evolve.
Initially, the blogs and chat rooms of the early internet, reserved for nerds and oddballs, were left to self-regulate. In the mid- to late-2000s, existing laws banning things like racism and hate crimes were hastily updated to cover the increasingly popular online mixing pools that had been gaining traction for the past few years, but without any consideration for how such laws would actually be applied and enforced for these primordial social networks. This was perhaps the original sin of social media regulation: policy decisions by people who were completely unprepared to protect their citizens from a swiftly-changing technology about which they knew very little and probably dismissed as a passing fad. Given the complete failure of US officials to grasp even the basics of social media during their relatively recent questioning of social media barons in the past decade ("Senator, we run ads." [^1]), I can only imagine what farcical ideas were tossed around nearly two decades earlier.
And yet, it is precisely these glacially-moving dinosaurs who are the only ones capable of protecting current and future generations from the ever-changing face of social media.
“Pure Bullshit”
That’s how French President Emmanuel Macron in February described the “free-speech” defence of social media platforms: “Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how are you guided to this so-called free speech, especially when it is guided from one hate speech to another.” I wholeheartedly agree with him. The failure of self- and light-touch regulation of social media has never been more apparent.
There is increasing evidence that the political ideologies of young men and women are diverging [^2], driven by algorithms feeding users diametrically opposed content and driving them deeper into their own echo chambers and threatening the existing social contract. Social media addiction is linked to reduced productivity, social isolation, and a reduction in overall life satisfaction [^3].
Governments globally are belatedly awaking to the damage that these platforms are doing - and have already done - to their populations: socially, economically, and in terms of national security. This is a problem for the advertising-driven business model of US social media behemoths like Meta Platform Inc.’s Instagram, Elon Musk’s X, and the recently established US-arm of TikTok. It’s also a problem for Trump’s Republican party and their supposed plans for hemispheric influence[^4].
It’s a feature, not a bug, as goes the adage. Social media companies cannot self-regulate and their very business model relies entirely on addiction, exploitation, and rage-inducing, clickbait rabbit holes keeping eyes glued to screens for as long as possible.
Cornflakes, & Kids in Blankets
In December of last year, Australia implemented the world’s first social media ban for children under the age of sixteen. It was a policy widely popular with parents with regards to its stated aims: getting children off their phones and away from the harm that social media was doing to them. Before it had even taken effect, countries across Europe (including Austria, Slovenia, and the UK) and South-East Asia (notably Indonesia), had announced they too were looking at implementing stricter controls. Prior to this, some of these countries had also put restrictions in place on accessing adult content. The two main methods involve either handing over your ID, or submitting yourself to an AI facial scan for age verification.
Whilst ostensibly well-intentioned, both methods are deeply flawed and remind me of Will Smith’s enthusiastic classmate on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: “He a little confused, but he got the spirit”. Blanket bans on social media sites are blunt instruments, either easily circumvented using VPNs or only serving to push children to even less-regulated corners of the web. For adults, handing over sensitive information to the same companies that society have collectively agreed can’t be trusted with the date of your birthday let alone your ID or a 3d scan of your face, is a paradox hardly worth addressing.
The Cave of Private yet Verifiable Wonders
So what is left? If governments cannot be trusted to keep up with silicon valley, and techbros can’t be trusted full stop, what other links remain in the chain? Aside from trying to improve education for users (and potential, future users) of social media on the dangers they do and will face, there is in fact another piece of the puzzle: the verification mechanism itself.
Oddly, the solution lies even further back than the policy decisions of the late 2000s, the birth of social media as we know it around the turn of the millennium, and even before the advent of the public World Wide Web itself in 1993.
Based on work beginning in 1985, a paper that appeared in the incredibly wonk-ish Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal on Computing in 1989 outlined the first Zero-knowledge Proof (ZKP): a way to prove whether something was true or not, without giving away any more information.
This piece is about the application, rather than their technicalities, of ZKPs, but to give you a very high-level example (further explained with some beautiful ASCII art below): imagine a ring-shaped cave with only one entrance and a magic door at the other end that can be opened only with a secret word. To prove to the verifier, Victor, that she knows the secret word without telling him the secret word, Peggy, the prover, goes into the cave by a random entrance (A/B) which Victor cannot see. Victor then shouts for Peggy to exit by either A or B, again chosen at random. If Peggy knows the secret word, she will be able to exit by whichever path Victor chooses every single time and prove that she knows the secret word to open the magic door without ever revealing the secret word to Victor. By applying something similar to social media accounts (or any online service), you can prove whether or not someone is over the age of 16 (or, indeed whether they’re a real person at all rather than an AI bot).
[Stage 1] Peggy takes either path A or B, while Victor waits outside, unable to see which entrance path she took.
(V) .------- A -------.
/ _______ \
/ / \ \
| |====| [Magic Door Closed]
\ \ _________/ /
\ (P) /
'------- B -------'
[Stage 2] Victor randomly chooses an exit path.
.------- A -------.
/ _______ \
/ / \ \
(V) | |====| [Magic Door Closed]
"A!" \ \ _________/ /
\ (P) /
'------- B -------'
[Stage 3] Peggy reliably appears at the exit named by Victor.
.------- A -------.
/ _______ \
/ <-- / \ \
(V) (P) | | - |[Magic Door Opened]
"OK" \ \ _________/ /
\ /
'------- B -------'
Some arguments against ZKPs misunderstand how they work, which is perhaps attributable to the simplified explanations like the one I’ve used above. The proof tokens work sort of like a signed, one-time pass: whilst the issuer knows you’ve requested it, they do not know where you use it, and so any concerns regarding direct traceability are unfounded. However, ZKPs are nonetheless a privilege of citizens who trust their governments (or, at least, the systems in place to hold said governments accountable), and their synergy of verifiable trust and privacy is not perfect. In order to generate proofs locally (thereby negating any need for requests to be sent to the government/some other body), ZKPs necessitate that you have a government-sponsored or government-authorised app on your device to securely hold the credentials proving you’re a real human being of a certain age. This is quite fine when you feel confident that your government will respect the part of the T&Cs that says they can’t access your data. It is problematic at best (and dangerous at worst) when there is reason to believe that the app is really a piece of state-spyware for snooping on citizens and crushing dissent (here’s looking at you, Prabowo Subianto). There are (at least in countries with sufficient freedoms) ways around this potential pitfall. Assuming that you’re allowed and able to do so, your credentials can be stored in an open-source identity and access management (IAM) wallet. The government issues you the data to which you’re entitled, you take that somewhere else and use it to generate proofs from there, without any further involvement from the issuing party.
At present, this may feel like a lot of hoop-jumping for the lay-person who has only just got to grips with installing and turning on a VPN. As the technology becomes more mainstream however, and users become increasingly savvy, ZKPs remain the best option both for citizens wishing to protect their privacy and governments wishing to protect their citizens.
The Sins of our Phubbers
With any luck, such measures may in fact turn out to be a stop-gap. There is some evidence that an increasing proportion of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha, perhaps having themselves been victims of ‘phubbing’ by the adults around them and wary of repeating the same mistakes, are rejecting the culture of social media and smartphone addiction that has so enraptured their parents’ generation[^5]. Young people, long devoid of any hope that public bodies are coming to rescue them from endless scrolling, are beginning to be heard as evidenced by the recent ruling in a California jury trial[^6].
Wall-E showcased a future that young millennials recognised. One that didn’t look too dissimilar from the present to which they belonged. Slobs addicted to screens, aware enough of their reality to notice but too far gone to do anything about it. Gen Alpha may have heeded the warning.
References
[^1] In 2018, the late US Republican Senator for Utah, Orrin Hatch (then 84-years old), asked Mark Zuckerberg, during the latter’s testimony to congress, how Facebook made money when users didn’t directly pay for it. The earnest question and subsequent response generated many memes at the time, but was sound insofar as encouraging more people to recognise that it was their attention and their data that were really Facebook’s saleable product. Another remark three years later by US Democratic Senator for Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal ("Will you commit to ending the finsta?) was similarly derided as being out of touch, but was actually a very prescient question given the conversations governments are having now about bots, age-restrictions, and identity verification.
[^2] King’s College London, Gen Z men and women most divided on gender equality, global study shows, King’s College London, 2025. Accessed 4th April 2026, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/gen-z-men-and-women-most-divided-on-gender-equality-global-study-shows. (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/gen-z-men-and-women-most-divided-on-gender-equality-global-study-shows)
[^3] Shannon, H., Bush, K., Villeneuve, P. J., Hellemans, K. G., & Guimond, S. (2022). Problematic social media use in adolescents and young adults: systematic review and meta-analysis. JMIR Mental Health, 9(4), e33450 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9052033/)
[^4] I am deeply sceptical of the existence of a unified, grand strategy by Trump and his inner circle, as opposed to haphazardly implemented whims.
[^5] Max Chafkin, Millennials Melted Their Brains With Screens. Their Kids Want None of It, Bloomberg, 18th February 2026. Accessed 4th April 2026, (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-18/are-smartphones-bad-for-kids-why-gen-alpha-is-pushing-back-on-social-media)
[^6] ABC News, Unpacking the social media addiction ruling against Meta and YouTube, and what it means for users, ABC, 2026. Accessed 4th April 2026, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-26/what-the-social-media-addiction-trial-means-for-australia/106497250