Let Us Not Abandon Our Children

Aiden Abbott writes:

Keir Starmer is set to continue his valiant crusade against children using the internet, with a “game-changer” policy package reportedly in the offing. Though this won’t involve a total, Australia-style ban on social media for under-16s, the consensus among the civil society groups involved in the consultation, such as the Molly Rose Foundation and the NSPCC, is evidently in favour of further restrictions. These include calls for social media platforms to remove functions like disappearing messages and the ability to talk with strangers for younger users, as well as allegedly “addictive” features such as auto-play on videos and “infinite scrolling”. 

Readers may remember a similar spasm of prohibitionism during the twilight months of Rishi Sunak’s government, when the Tories attempted to put the kibosh on disposable vapes, nitrous oxide and mobile phones in schools. [There should have been an Oxford comma there. Or should there?] Starmer, apparently, has decided this is a winning strategy. Given the bipartisan support enjoyed by the Online Safety Act, it must look like an easy win. And, God knows, Starmer could use a win.

Yet while some of the incoming reforms have merit, much of the thinking behind them rests on the blithe assumption that social media has an addictive power comparable to crack cocaine or alcohol. That claim is routinely backed up by scary maps of brains lit up with dopamine. Of course, there are many other phenomena which produce dopamine, and one wonders whether we could draw up similarly scary maps of the brains of people holding a puppy or gazing at someone with whom they are in love.

For all that politicians stress how terrible phones and laptops are for us, the evidence is far more dubious than one might expect. According to 33 studies, analysed by 14 authors for a research paper by the American Psychological Association in 2021, screen usage apparently plays “little role in mental health concerns”. In any case, there is a far more straightforward explanation than so-called addiction as to why young people might spend their free time online: that modern life is cloistered and oppressive, and the internet is not.

A 16-year-old today will have lost a considerable chunk of their remembered life so far to Covid lockdowns. Looking ahead, they will see a grim employment market, with graduate job listings falling by 33% between 2024 and 2025. A rising cost of living is pushing the possibility of moving out further and further away. If the Government gets its way, nobody born after 2008 will ever be able to legally purchase a pack of cigarettes.

As young people’s lives become increasingly constrained, as the horizon of possibility closes in, the internet remains dazzlingly infinite: the largest, most readily accessible corpus of information mankind has ever compiled. From the picture painted by Starmer or Kemi Badenoch, one would assume there is nothing there except revenge porn and YouTube Shorts of household objects being put in a hydraulic press. That it is also the medium by which virtually all literature ever written has become freely available to all, that it has left the press infinitely safer from the kind of state thuggery to which it was once subjected by the likes of Alastair Campbell, apparently does not warrant a mention.

Though fellow party leaders Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski have rightly noted the authoritarian nature of Starmer’s attacks on online freedom, the underlying thesis has gone virtually unchallenged: that young people using the internet is dangerous and unhealthy. Until opponents of the Online Safety Act can bring themselves to articulate a positive case for the internet on its own grounds, we will find ourselves forever on the back foot. The stakes are too high. Think back to that supposed intellectual golden age before the algorithms turned our brains to mush — the age of the TV guide. Of Bargain Hunt and Fat Families. Of James Corden and onesie-clad Eurovision parties. Let us not abandon our children, on whom this country has been hard enough, to the clammy embrace of the Gogglebox sofa.

Kemi Badenoch and Jess Phillips are of one mind in wishing to ban under-16s from social media, lest they discover that, for example, Britain’s projected spending of 10.6% of GDP on welfare was lower than in much of Europe, with more than half of it going to the recipients of what was nevertheless the lowest pension of any comparable country, and with two in five Universal Credit claimants in work, such that the State was subsidising low pay by corporations that paid kings’ ransoms at the top. By such means as to avoid most or all taxation, of course.

If, as Wes Streeting would have it, social media were comparable to smoking, then would Phillips or Badenoch consider herself powerless to stop under-16s from smoking in her home? Would she have much sympathy with any adult who professed such impotence? These comparisons reinforce the point that the responsibility is parental. The technology is available, and few parents of under-16s grew up offgrid. They did, however, grow up without the digital ID that everyone would need to make this ban work. And that freedom is worth passing on.