Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits Young Brits are souring on the internet, with increasing numbers seeing it as damaging to society and their mental health, according to latest research published by Ofcom. The UK's communications regulator found that in June 2025, just a third of those aged 18-34 agreed the internet is good for society, down from 42 percent a …
The internet is fine, as a series of useful resources which are searchable. It's a tool to be picked up, consulted then put down again and it's amazing for that.
For idling on and anything social media, not so much
Same with beer, pick it up now and then for a chat then leave it and go, amazing. Drinking for 6 hours a day every day while you ignore your family, again not so much.
everything in moderation
"The internet is fine, as a series of useful resources which are searchable. It's a tool to be picked up, consulted then put down again and it's amazing for that."
Disagree with that, enshitification of search engines and the rise of LLMs are making that much much worse. Plus social media has sucked in all the little sellers of cool things or social clubs, etc so they don't have their own web presence which is bloody terrible so you can't avoid SM. Moderation is not the full answer at all.
I agree about the disappearance of small org. web sites. I really don't like the fact that they now rely on commercial entities who have no respect for the privacy of their users, which has control of their content and how it is presented, and the fact that it brings other users to these large, money oriented services. This makes them subject to exploitation, and possibly either without their explicit knowledge and their will.
Whenever I see that he only point of contact for an org. is a social media site, I often try to find someone else in their place. Not always possible, but...
"Plus social media has sucked in all the little sellers of cool things or social clubs, etc so they don't have their own web presence which is bloody terrible"
Yes, very much so - and also all those obscure chat lists on various hobbies which lived on Yahoo Groups and similar. All now hoovered up into Facebook. Facebook also now restricts how much you can see even on public sites (e.g. local club sites) to the first few posts (they started doing this fairly recently, I think) so even viewing things - in a private browsing session, with ad blockers, etc, of course - is not really practical now.
I refuse to have an account on Facebook, so am now effectively excluded from such things, which is a pity but that's how it is now.
"Disagree with that, enshitification of search engines and the rise of LLMs are making that much much worse."
If you use it to do your thinking or use it without thinking, that's a problem.
I have admit that search engines are getting less and less useful even when using regular expressions to limit the amount of spam. I'm tempted to set up a key combo that appends "-amazon, -audible, -walmart, -target, -, -, -" to append to every search. Even when I AM shopping for something, I don't want every return from a search to be sites trying to sell me something. I want that one or two hits that tells me what I'm looking for is complete crap so I catch myself before inputting my payment details.
I can avoid SM since I'm long past the age where I feel the need to be ultra-social.
Moderation is highly useful in places and isn't censorship as some claim. There's a site that curates news articles that I like, but the comment section is rife with rabid anti-semites and all sorts of other weirdos. It could use a big glug of moderation.
"Social media is automated exploitation"
It's the cigarettes of the 21st century.
Run by big corporations, who promote it as healthy and lobby governments at every opportunity. It's deliberately designed to be addictive. Scientific research starting to come out, showing what everyone really knew all along anyway and governments starting to legislate and age restrict it. The similarities are striking.
Is that what it said? Pretty sure it said "A section of the research....".
They also stated the younger generation turn off notifications and turn on DND, so that could be from games, email, banking & shopping apps and on and on.
And only a idiot (or tech bro) doesn't now think that search is completely broken with it either being unrelated paid for promotions or AI slop.
Thats going to depend highly on what your xyz is, if its some consumer product like a microwave the results may be places offering to sell you one - and odds are thats what you're looking for.
I tried xyz == "Sailing tips" and got 3 or 4 free to watch youtube videos then a free to read article in yachtingworld . com
So whats the problem?
what you you searching for ?
Over recent weeks on multiple sites ranging from MSN to Ars Technica on subjects ranging from "UK vehicle tax" to energy bills to christmas lights, I'm finding it impossible to post even just the truth/history of a subject, let alone an opinion. Automated "guideline checkers" reject my posts without providing reasons; I don't swear, nor use emojis, and i'm not trying to sell anyone anything, nor am I casting aspersions to any identifiable particule or subset of society. Even just the sentence "I'm posting this." was rejected by some sites. El Reg is one of the few sites I still feel I can post without worry.
Conspiracy Theory incoming:
Maybe I'm on some sort of blacklist that started circulating? Maybe because my children are using my broadband connection, online accounts, and even Tor, to learn actual facts and to search for now age restricted or controversial stuff like "how to build a nuclear bomb?", "what is the terrorists handbook?", "where can I buy Mein Kampf?" or "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" because they hear about it on the news or at school? Yes, I trust my kids and their intelligence to filter out the ever increasing AI and non-AI excrement building up online, despite them being classified as minors by the government, and not minors by airlines, theme parks and many other price gouging entities. They also trust enough to ask me, or even my Dad - the family historian, about what they "learn" from the internet - a kind of validation so to speak.
If it's rejecting genuinely innocuous stuff then the content filtering system has possibly found your IP address on a list of suspect ones? Doesn't mean you've done anything wrong, but the way IP addresses get blacklisted is not at all transparent, and getting un-blacklisted can be nigh on impossible.
"Another reason may be increasing interest in how the internet can damage young people, even if this tends to focus on those a bit younger than the group in question."
Perhaps the group in question are reporting what they are reporting precisely because they grew up using the internet, and feel damaged by it.
And maybe because they barely (or don't at all) remember what the world was like before the internet, so haven't a good baseline for the benefit/harm consideration.
They could of course experience this voluntarily - turn their phone off and leave it off (landline calls only!), likewise tablets, desktops (other than work machines for work purposes only), online media streaming devices, and any "smart" tat they own. Instead they're apparently unhappy with the internet but still use it for 6+ hours a day.
I think this article is confusing the internet as a whole with social media. Social media is awful now and both my children, who are in the same age group as this survey, no longer use it. But the internet is so much more than social media and as a place to answer nearly every question it is invaluable.
Post enshittification I’m not sure this is true for the general user with the possible exception of Wikipedia. Most academic and mainstream media / news sites are paywalled , so just going on the nets seems to be like opening a sewer outlet into your home. Search has been slopped and enshittified, click bait factories exist to farm ad revenue not to provide any kind of accurate, trusted knowledge.
TLDR: the internet is for porn..soon to be performed by extra sloppy AI.
I started using the Internet when Archie and Gopher were trying to make FTP sites on the web more usable, and usenet and SMTP mail were still mainly store-and-forward, effectively point-to-point networks over the Internet.
These all but disappeared when HTML and HTTP became the 'way the Internet worked'.
So what traffic on the Internet are you talking about that is distinct from the World Wide Web?
Today, you cannot really talk about the Internet in isolation, as although it exists as a transport layer, I would guess that almost all traffic is now HTTP related, in one way or another. Even when other protocols are in use, they're often tunnelled through HTTP, because people have worked out that HTTP[S] nearly always works through a firewall or NAT, so have found ways of pushing other services through that one 'universal' one. This is even going as far as running DNS through HTTP, like Google advocate.
Many sites on the Internet have shutdown their legacy services like FTP, mainly as it is so difficult to keep them secure.
So which part of the Internet that is not web related are you referring to?
Common use language doesn't change the definition. Much the same as a physicist wouldn't accept that mass and weight are okay to use interchangeably. It doesn't matter to the general population, but it does to those "in the trade". So, forgive me for not answering your question directly, but that's my answer, and the reason for the icon I chose. I wouldn't bat an eyelid to, or correct, the use of either in every day dialogue.
o7
[Wanted to add a couple of things, but missed the edit window.]
The use of "the internet" rather than "the web" is so conflated in common use that the web is very, very rarely used, as you say - to the point that "the WWW" may not be understood by some. But still both Cambridge and Merriam-Webster correctly make the distinction in their definitions.
Cheers!
Limit your online life. Protect your personal info. Protect your mental health. Social media consumes you, AI is not your friend.
Go outside, join a walking or hiking club. Go off grid, camp, walk, swim, explore. Listen and observe.
Just some ideas, make your own adventure.
And yet, here you are on the Internet/Web yourself. Are you not also a little to blame?
Me, I still see the Internet as useful, but I deliberately skip almost all of the social media side of things.
I can remember life before the Internet, where researching even basic facts required travel, mostly to where books were stored, and then much browsing and reading to find the info you wanted.
Whilst I do have fond memories of browsing book stores and libraries, and buying copious periodicals and newspapers, I would not really want to go back there for the primary source of information (although even libraries enabled physical interactions, something that appears to be dying, as you pointed out). The internet, and the Web have opened up huge vistas to things beyond the reach of people in the pre-internet age, but it's gone a bit too far. It's also made possible the proliferation of incorrect or biased information, aimed at people who do not have the ability to fact check it. Whether people can cope with that is another story that is panning out in real time.
Maybe the Internet was best when there were significant hurdles to it's use, such that the audience (and information providers) were more likely to be able to cope with the torrent of information that it made available.
Maybe it's the over 55's are the generation that created and nurtured the internet. As others have commented we still have some idea of life without it, how to switch it off and moderate it, and how it can be a useful tool. Just because it offers a new way of doing something, doesn't mean it is a better way.
There are younger folks who know nothing but the internet and without it they would struggle to survive - I'm talking about the ones who struggle to hold a telephone (or face to face) conversation, have no clue what real money is, have poor social interaction skills, think the solution to every disagreement is to throw a strop, unable to find their @rse without a satnav, etc., Again, as others point out, the enshitification of everything continues and maybe they are getting tired of it and starting to realise rather than them controlling the technology, the technology is there to control them.
Well, yes. We were in on the early days and know that there is more to the web than five giant websites that consist of screenshots of the other four. The trick that the big companies pulled off was to make their stuff useful to the point where it was essential and then make it toxic and profitable. It is possible to have actual community connection on the intarwebs but not on social media.
> young adults disagreed the internet helps their mental health
A possible qualification is that it's internet content that is damaging, rather than the Internet itself.
And if we are to accept that the problem is content, not mode of transmission, then it is reasonable to question all the modes of delivery: internet, TV, newspaper (for younger readers, these are/were large sheets of paper containing "stories¹" used to avoid accidental eye contact with others in close proximity.)
More experienced, or just cynical, users might express surprise that anyone would ever trust, believe or accept content found on the internet.
[1] mostly more-or-less made up
This report is a propaganda piece to help justify the Online Safety Act (OSA) and nothing more. I would have expected El Reg to make this clearer given a potentially international readership who might not know what is going on in the UK right now, namely the fight between profit-driven large corporations and central government to control the minds of the people, with both the private and public sector working against the best interests of those they claim to serve.
The oldest information used in the report for the overwhelming majority of surveys only dates back to 2023, in line with the introduction of OSA. Even if it wasn't, and even if surveys had been running for decades, the scope of what is and is not part of the Internet changes so regularly as to be worthless. Additionally, a truly neutral definition of what the Internet consists of was not supplied at the time of surveying people, guaranteeing those surveyed won't be thinking of modern live TV, telephony (including video calls), automated telling, instant payments, instant messaging, calendaring, P2P file sharing, multiplayer gaming involving more than 8 friends... and a great many other things the Internet improved, all of which augment our real life experiences.
Folks are going to be thinking of the cesspit of World Wide Web services ran by unethical commercial interests which bait people into uploading attention grabbing trash. All in all a teeny tiny portion of what the Internet has to offer.
So twice as many young people think the internet (and wow, what a broad term) is beneficial than harming, the rest say it's neutral. And this is shown as proof the "internet" is dangerous because the harmful score has slightly increased since the last survey.
What could have slightly changed peoples opinion of the internet in the time between surveys, has it got significantly worse since last time, or has there been a campaign by the government and media to scare people into supporting new legislation to control the internet and how people pass dissenting views (some of which are, it's true, bat shit carazy but loonies existed before the internet).
And the idea that protecting children from the devices given to them, and paid for, by their parents (who've tried nothing and they are all out of ideas) is best served by policing EVERYBODY ELSE is as crazy getting the Flat Earthers to regulate satelites.
As pretty much everyone else has said, this article conflates "the internet" and "social media".
Young people have never experienced life without the internet, so if they were no longer able to use Apple/Google Pay, play network games, obtain an internet connection (usually wi-fi, sometimes mobile data, ever so occasionally ethernet) in any given location etc, they would soon cry foul. My teenage kids complain if they have to wait even a few seconds for such services to become available.
So they're not talking about the cables that enable/connect of all these services ("the internet"); they are talking about specific end-user applications - you know the ones. Many of these young people possibly don't even realise that "the internet" facilitates most of the day-to-day interactions which they now take for granted.
(I also agree with the poster who quoted a doctor as saying that young people themselves conflate "mental health" and "happiness". Life is stressful - deal with it.)
"the intenet" is neutral, it's a communications system. It's like saying people have no confidence in "copper wiring" instead of people making malicious phone calls. It's what *PEOPLE* /do/ with the communication systems they communicate with that has impacts. I got a nasty letter, I have no confidence in the postal system!!!!!
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