Good grief! Today, I feel obliged to praise Kemi Badenoch, a politician who hitherto has either dismayed or inflamed me. She is divisive and deliberately so. But when she emphatically told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday that a Tory government would bar children under 16 from accessing many social media platforms, I was with her.
So did Labour’s Andy Burnham, who said: “I find myself agreeing with a lot of what Kemi Badenoch is saying about children and social media. It seems to me parents would welcome a cross-party consensus around much bolder action.” Many of them – teachers, social workers, youth workers, prison officers – have been arguing for better child safety online measures for years and years, while successive governments have faffed about.
This Government has imparted mixed messages. Wes Streeting apparently wants more action to protect our young, but Starmer and his Technology Secretary Liz Kendall were unconvinced. Now they are reportedly open to possible controls.
Elon Musk’s Grok AI tool is also causing widespread alarm. It is being used to create sexual images of partially clothed women and children. Users even degraded Renee Nicole Good, shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Suddenly, our usually unreactive PM has turned tough, condemning the “disgusting” content and calling on Musk to get the stuff down while promising legal penalties if he does not. Call it the Kemi effect. And let us be thankful.
In December, Australia banned children under 16 from social media sites. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, Snap, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and TikTok were instructed to comply or risk fines of up to $49.5m. The onus is on the companies, not parents or adults working with kids. Denmark has done the same, but set its bar at 15 years old. Other countries may well follow suit.
The results of the massive social experiment we have been running will be revealed in time. The big tech bros are not being overly cooperative. Meta, for example, called on the Australian government “to engage with industry constructively to find a better way forward, such as incentivising all of industry to raise the standard in providing safe, privacy-preserving, age appropriate experiences online, instead of blanket bans”. Weaselly and evasive. Some children’s organisations warn that kids will bypass the rules or find new, more dangerous sites. And libertarians are jumping up and down about free speech. I find these objections spurious.
Most parents in the UK would support an Australia-type ban. A Mumsnet survey last spring found 83 per cent were for a ban and only 17 per cent against; a YouGov survey in December found 74 per cent of all adults would support it.
Evidence of the harm that is being done to toddlers, pre-teens and early teens is accumulating. In the UK, toddlers who spend more time on screens score lower in vocabulary tests than those who spend less time on screens. Australian researchers have found that eating disorders among 10- to 19-year-olds have risen by 86 per cent since 2012, when social media usage started to take off. The demand for ADHD assessments has reached record levels.
The documentarian and filmmaker Baroness Beeban Kidron has been warning us about the impact of digital media on young minds. She has accumulated evidence, made films with young people and relentlessly campaigned on the issue. We should have listened.
In a lecture in Washington in 2023, she reminded the audience that “above any other consideration, society must act in the best interests of the child… It must not be left to children to adapt to a digital world designed for adults and disdainful of their rights and needs but rather build the digital world that children deserve – one algorithm at a time – anything less is an erosion of childhood itself.”
I’ve seen that erosion. This weekend, the youngest member of our family, aged eight, came to stay. He is a lively, curious child. We chatted about football, how charcoal becomes diamonds, David Attenborough and maths, his favourite subject. We shared jokes, played patience with two sets of cards, made blueberry pancakes and olive bread. Then he borrowed my phone to play games, and though he wasn’t on social media he entered a different universe.
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Our voices didn’t reach him. I took the phone away and told him his behaviour had upset us. He felt bad. I did too. I shouldn’t have given him the phone. Meanwhile digital mega-businesses feel no guilt, shirk all responsibility.
Laws protecting children are an absolute duty of every government. Prohibition will induce shock and withdrawal symptoms among the child users of social media. But they will recover. And the digital masters of the universe will, hopefully, comply with their duties.
You would not let a school or sports club take over your child’s head and pull them into chambers of rapture and dependency. Social media entrappers have done that for decades now. Australia has led the way. The UK must follow. It is time.
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