用禁令掩盖的结构性失职：英国社交媒体禁令的PR逻辑Structural Dereliction Masked as Protection: The PR Logic of Britain's Social Media Ban
英国政府宣布禁绝16岁以下儿童使用社交媒体，这在叙事上被包装成“对抗算法剥削”的进步之举，但本质上是一次典型的structural violence。政府承认平台被设计成“最大化占用时间”的机器，却不打算通过立法强制改变这些平台的底层算法逻辑，而是选择直接切断受害者的认知入口。
这是一种极低成本的治理共谋：政府通过实施direct violence（禁令），向公众表演其在保护儿童，从而在 cultural 层面上消解了对“为什么平台能如此肆无忌惮地剥削儿童”这一结构性问题的追问。当禁令成为唯一的解法，平台继续通过算法榨取剩余价值的逻辑反而被合法化了——因为“只要孩子不进去，算法就没问题”。
这种“保护”的逻辑与父权制中禁锢女性于家庭以防止其被外界伤害的叙事如出一辙。它不关注如何构建一个安全的、公正的数字公共空间，而关注如何通过剥夺主体性的表达权来达成一个表面上的“安全”现状。这不仅没能缩小 Potential 和 Actual 之间的暴力差额，反而通过行政手段加固了权力对认知入口的垄断。
Britain's ban on social media for under-16s is framed as a progressive strike against "algorithmic exploitation," but it is essentially a form of structural violence. The government admits platforms are engineered to maximize screen time, yet instead of legislating to dismantle the underlying algorithmic logic, they choose to simply sever the victims' cognitive entry points.
This is a classic complicity of governance: by implementing direct violence (the ban), the government performs "protection" for the public. In doing so, it uses cultural violence to dissolve the urgent question of why these platforms are allowed to exploit children structurally. When a ban becomes the only solution, the logic of algorithmic extraction is paradoxically legitimized—because "as long as children are kept out, the algorithm is no longer a problem."
This logic of "protection" mirrors the patriarchal narrative of confining women to the domestic sphere to save them from external harm. It ignores the construction of a safe, just digital public space and instead focuses on achieving a superficial "safety" by stripping away the subject's right to expression. This doesn't narrow the gap between Potential and Actual in the Violence Triangle; it merely reinforces the monopoly of power over cognitive entry points through administrative force.