Under-16s could be banned from social media within months ...Middle East

The British government is open to following Australia and banning the under-16s from social media, The i Paper understands.

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall is understood to be open-minded about a possible restriction, but no decision has yet been taken.

Ministers are to monitor the situation in Australia, where a social media ban for under-16s came into force in December, before coming to a view here.

There is no timetable set for a decision on a possible ban in the UK, but it is understood this would be made within months rather than years.

But Kendall is also understood to be aware of arguments made by internet safety organisations like the Molly Rose Foundation and the NSPCC, who have expressed concerns about a ban on under-16s.

They argue that new laws would draw children towards unregulated sites not covered by the ban, and that teenagers would face a cliff-edge at 16 where they would be unprepared for the world of social media.

There is, however, growing political support across Westminster for restricting social media access for children.

At the weekend Tory leader Kemi Badenoch announced that a Conservative government would introduce a ban for under-16s, while on Monday Nigel Farage left the door open to a similar move.

The Reform leader said that while he was generally against banning things, he wanted to “see how it works” in Australia before coming to a decision.

Farage told a press conference in Westminster: “I 100 per cent support the ban on smart phones in schools.

“When it comes to banning things, I am not very keen generally on banning things. My answer would be, let’s see where Australia is in six months’ time, let’s see whether this actually works. 

“We have laws of course about when you can start drinking, do those laws actually stop people drinking under 18, I am not sure they do.

“I would say, let’s see the Australian experiment, let’s see how it works and let’s make our minds up.”

On Sunday, Badenoch told the BBC social media platforms were profiting from children’s “anxiety” and “distraction” and were “designed to be addictive”.

Kendall’s Cabinet colleague Wes Streeting last week suggested he was also sympathetic to the UK following Australia.

The Health Secretary told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Matt Chorley that he was “following that debate really closely”, adding: 

“One of the advantages of Australia doing this is that we can see how it works.

“I think the drivers behind Australia’s decision are things we’re worried about here in the UK, whether that’s cyberbullying, whether, that’s things like body image and eating disorders and mental ill health, whether that’s the risk of grooming, the risk of people also being groomed into terrorism and serious organised crime, so the dark side of the internet. 

“The challenge we’re having is we don’t want to be a generation of adults who are saying to young people, stop the world, we want to get off because this is the way the world is moving and I want young people to be confident about using technology. 

“But the analogy I would use is: when I was growing up, the adults of the time wanted us to be able to use a hammer and nails and a saw, and that’s why we did woodwork. 

“What they didn’t do was say, here you are kids in nursery, here’s a box of tools, here’s some hammer and nails, off you go, you need to learn to use this, and we’ll come back in half an hour and see how you’ve got on.”

Streeting last month commissioned an independent review into ADHD, autism and mental health and it is understood that it will look at whether technology has played a role in an increase of diagnoses of such conditions.

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The minister also told the BBC: “We’re allowing a lot of unsupervised use of this technology, and often young people are ahead of adults in terms of circumventing tools, protections. 

“So I’m thinking about this very much through a health and wellbeing lens and the impact it’s having on the health and well-being of children and young people, let alone their concentration, their learning. 

“I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel like my concentration span suffers because of doomscrolling and the way in which information is served up in increasingly short bite-size chunks and I worry about what that means for the development and the cognitive development of a generation of children and young people.”

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