Almost half the 16-21 year olds surveyed in Britain wish the internet didn’t exist, and 70% say social media makes them feel bad about themselves.
https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/insights-and-media/media-centre/press-releases/2025/may/half-of-young-people-want-to-grow-up-in-a-world-without-internet/
29 Comments
Submission Statement
*79% of 16-21 year olds say technology companies should be required by law to build robust privacy safeguards into technology and platforms used by children and teenagers.*
This is another illustration of the huge divide between Big Tech and everyone else. Big Tech wants total freedom from regulation with no accountability for any damage or costs to others they cause. The general population overwhelmingly feels the opposite. Thanks to their ability to line politician’s pockets, it’s Big Tech who usually wins out.
In Britain’s case, desperate to get a trade deal with the US, it’s been dangling the offer of even less regulation on tech & AI.
What stops these people from simply not using the Internet and social networks? Alcohol is freely sold in stores, but this does not mean that you must necessarily buy everything you see and get drunk to the point of unconsciousness.
I get that it’s hard to turn off, but if you don’t want the internet to exist…you can just not use it.
Bring back the internet before social media services.
“The internet” and “social media” are shibboleths that often stand in for “everything I don’t like about modernity.” People rarely mean the ability to reach out to family members across the globe, or to buy what you need instantly, or to be able to watch and listen to almost anything, or to share vast amounts of information quickly at their jobs, or to game online with their friends, etc. etc.
Good to see some sense in younger generations, I hope they will use tech more responsibly
Not in that age range, but leaving social media and only using Reddit for meaningful or lighthearted exchanges with like-minded people in hobby communities has been the best internet-related shift for my mental health.
Honestly, based
Can’t wait for social networks to die due to rampant bots and glazing, hallucinating ai
I believe the real problem is monopolization, we always need alternatives, social media has contributed a lot to us, its role in communication cannot be denied, but if there was an alternative, Facebook would not be able to ask for biometrics and driving license photos nowadays 🤡
Just stop with it then! Put that phone down and abandon the socials!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we should’ve kept the internet how it was in 2008-2009. Algorithms for increasing engagement came and fucked everything up.
Why are people so weak and insecure all the time. Yes someone on social media is having a great time. Outside of social people lots of people are having a better time than you. That’s life. Get on with it.
I genuinely don’t get it. People are aware that they can simply not use the internet, or at the very minimum not use the bits that upset them? It works really well for me, to the point people saying the internet make their lives worse sound insane. How?
They never had to put on a suit to apply for a job, book a flight through some flowery local travel agent, or try to divinate a practical route from a paper map that doesn’t even fit in the car when unfolded. Ha.
I wish it was gone too.
I am 100% not certain even as someone who believes in strong regulation of the tech industry (e.g. cryptocurrency, LLM usage, data protection etc) that the people asked really understand the full implications of government intervention in the way they describe.
Because it seems extremely convenient that apparently traditionally left-leaning cohorts are passionately calling for measures that despite being unenforceable match the politics of the current US Republican party and Priti Patel.
I turn 30 this year and the internet still makes me feel bad about myself.
So don’t use the internet…. Go outside and ground yourself, actually touch some grass. If your job requires you to be on the internet just stop a quit that job for a good old fashioned construction job or fire watch
Studies also shows to digital-detox is nonsense and does not work.
Life is just bloody hard, and often really sucks. These are easy scapegoats.
Using scapegoats as an excuse not to act, is a dangerous animal.
As is the procrastinating act of fighting imagined scapegoats, because they are easier to battle than your actual problems.
tbh yeah.. the internet is amazing for getting knowledge instantly but i hate it for everything else and I’m just not on socials anymore. it feels more like being a product now instead of connecting and interacting with people and honestly no thanks. plus the ads omg the ads, god the ADS. they’re everywhere get em away from me 😭
This somehow gives me a bit of hope for the future of our kids.
This goes along with my current theory that people, as the internet becomes more and more “dead” with the advent of AI content and bot farms, retreat to the real world instead of cyberspace. Maybe future generations use local mesh networks to connect in ways like the old Internet was, a bbs that connects people without bots and AI agents. It’s possible people give up on the internet altogether as well.
Growing up we retreated to the Internet to avoid the real world and created platforms to have community. But now the solution isn’t to jump platforms again, because they can be bought and enshitified, algorithmically trained to alienate you, the solution to that is to touch grass.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Social media is societal cancer.
Doing something you know is bad for you but you can’t stop. That’s the definition of addiction.
Bottom line: We’ve made (a) whole generation(s) addicted to these shitty social media apps, and it’s doing really ugly things to society as a whole, but were supposed to just let it happen so a select handful of megalomaniac billionaires can get even richer.
Just beautiful. 🤮
“aww that’s too bad, here’s more of it.” -Billionaire tech CEOs with an oligarch fetish
The internet has been great. Algorithmic social media, that’s the thing that’s fucked it all up for everyone. I doubt most of those people wish Wikipedia and text chat that isn’t billed per-message didn’t exist, and if they do, then I dread to think what kind of world they’d want.
The modern internet is largely the fault of bloodsuckers like Mark Zuckerberg and of post-Apple smartphones becoming most people’s primary if not sole means of engagement with it. We’d be a lot better off without Facebook and if more people used and were literate with the full breadths of the desktop web rather than just the most popular “apps”.
Everything eventually gets ruined. The internet back then was amazing and social media back then had features you don’t even have now like changing your pages wallpaper or see who’s viewing your profile. They literally tried making us pay for it (never forget about how important Net Neutrality is)
Also I think you’d get a different answer asking Americans (since a lot of them depend on the internet for income)
But the beauty is you don’t have to use it? I know it can be isolating from your peers, but if it’s genuinely making you feel bad then distance yourself from it?
I can understand wanting to wish away social media, but wishing the internet as a whole didn’t exist is wild.
Let me repeat: social media is probably one of the worst inventions in the past 50 years.