Freedom campaigners have warned that politicians are promoting a new fictional television drama to justify their pro-censorship agendas.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has at least twice called Adolescence—a highly-acclaimed Netflix series centering around a teenage boy accused of killing one of his female classmates, and which deals with the harms of social media use—a “documentary,” as if teeing up the introduction of real-life policies on the back of what are in fact fictionalised events.
It's beyond a joke that this is the second time Starmer has called "Adolescence" a documentary. He either isn't entirely sure of what the series *is* or he's completely lost his grip on the difference between fact and fiction.pic.twitter.com/2y9fiIyBww
— Ben Sixsmith (@BDSixsmith) April 2, 2025
Meanwhile, the series is being “seized upon” by Labour MPs as “‘evidence’ that we need more online censorship,” according to an article published by the head of the Free Speech Union.
It is of course true that many children in Britain and across the rest of Europe have—to put it mildly—unhealthy relationships with the online world. But children’s advocacy campaigner Molly Kingsley stressed that
The answer HAS to be in tackling the hardware (i.e., the smartphone) at the point of supply to kids, rather than in looking to messy and technically hard-to-enforce software/app regulation.
Instead, anti-online-censorship campaign group Reclaim The Net warned that “under the guise of online safety, what’s really coming is a regime of ID requirements, content policing, and mass data collection.”
But in a media landscape where feelings trump facts and fictional stabbings become case studies for policy, those warnings barely register.
"Netflix’s Adolescence is a Trojan horse for online censorship and surveillance policy"
— Together (@Togetherdec) April 1, 2025
"A four-part sob story about screen time is being used to rewrite the rules of the internet"
"All in the name of 'safety', of course"https://t.co/dZY43Xgcfm
Critics have also highlighted that a charity working in conjunction with the series has been awarded millions of pounds of taxpayer money in recent years, and will now help it be shown in all UK secondary schools, including to children deemed too young to watch it.
I don’t know if Adolescence is a Psyop, but let’s just say that Tender, the charity working in conjunction with it, was very ready to go, PR wise, on the day of its release (13th March).
— Charlotte Gill (@CharlotteCGill) April 1, 2025
Tender received £3.4m in taxpayer funding from 2020-24. https://t.co/VC8ADVUJrz pic.twitter.com/MEtxAAOVEV
