By Dexerto | Created at 2026-07-23 20:33:58 | Updated at 2026-08-05 03:38:05
1 week ago
A sitting Member of Parliament bet 200,000 TikTok likes that he’d take Club Penguin’s resurrection all the way to Parliament.
Gordon McKee, the 31-year-old Labour MP for Glasgow South who previously went viral for explaining the Employment Rights Bill in 30 seconds, turned his attention to something far less legislative.
In a new TikTok, McKee mourned the children’s MMO that Disney shut down in 2017 and wove it into the UK’s freshly confirmed plans to ban social media for under-16s. His argument boiled down to a question that sounds ridiculous until you sit with it for a second.
McKee calls Club Penguin a “safe space” in push to raise the game in Parliament
“The death of Club Penguin was a tragedy,” McKee said. “Not just because it was fun for kids, but because it was a safe space online and there isn’t enough of those.”
He ticked off the game’s safety credentials to bolster his case: human moderators who worked around the clock, chat filters that scrubbed out bad language, and an option that locked players into pre-written sentences so no personal information slipped through. You couldn’t send pictures, either.
McKee described the game as “a way for kids to learn how to use the internet safely and socialize with their friends online,” which, for a platform built around cartoon penguins waddling through snowball fights, turned out to be remarkably ahead of its time.
“As we move toward a ban for under sixteens on social media, we’ve got to make sure kids know how to use the internet safely and aren’t trapped in dangerous algorithms,” he added. If the video hit 200,000 likes, he promised, he would raise bringing back Club Penguin in Parliament.
Club Penguin, which Disney acquired in 2007 and shut down on March 30, 2017, ran 24/7 moderation and an “Ultimate Safe Chat” mode that restricted users to pre-approved messages. The game accumulated over 200 million accounts at its peak, and its closure prompted fans to build unofficial private servers that Disney later dismantled through copyright enforcement.
The video arrived amid a broader push from the UK government to protect children online, which has also included exploring restrictions that could ban kids from talking to strangers on gaming platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft.
