Ella Whelan writes:
After Australia banned under-16s from using social media last month, the UK government has proposed its own set of restrictions on young people’s social-media use. Keir Starmer’s Labour is considering giving Ofsted tougher guidance to check the use of phones and social media in schools. There could also be restrictions on so-called addictive features and a wider use of age checks, among other measures.
It’s not just Labour. Britain’s other political parties seem to be equally keen on clamping down on kids’ social-media use. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch took to X at the weekend to claim that the Tories had the idea first, arguing that ‘we need to help parents raise healthy, happy children who go on to make good decisions about their lives’. The Liberal Democrats argue that kids should be allowed on WhatsApp groups, but not on ‘platforms that use addictive algorithmic feeds or host inappropriate content’. What everyone seems to agree on is that it’s a bad thing for kids to use social media, and that legislation is needed to, in the words of Badenoch, ‘help parents’.
Discussions about children’s online experiences and the dangers they might face are nothing new. But in recent months, officialdom seems to have become increasingly concerned about protecting children’s ‘wellbeing’, rather than protecting them from ‘harm’. So instead of concerns about children seeing extreme content or writing nasty things about each other, the current focus is on the amount of time kids spend on social media. Hence much of the detail of the proposed restrictions focusses on ‘infinite scrolling’ and ‘excessive use’.
This focus on the duration of kids’ social-media use is revealing. It shows the extent to which calls for a ban are rooted in a lack of confidence in parental authority – a lack of confidence, that is, in parents’ capacity to control their kids’ behaviour and limit the amount of time they spend on social media.
True enough, it might be tricky for some parents to navigate the online world, to block certain content or monitor which sites their kids are looking at. But keeping a handle on the amount of time children spend online doesn’t take a PhD in computer science. You simply take the phone out of your child’s hand. Much like regulating children’s sweets intake, controlling young people’s access to the online world ought to be seen as just the latest in a long line of parental responsibilities.
But that’s not how the Labour Party has come to see it. This shouldn’t be a surprise given Labour’s history of intervention into family life stretches back to the days of New Labour. Many of today’s policies, from supervised toothbrushing in primary schools to the NHS’s obsessions with kids eating sugar, reveal the influence the Blairite ‘politics of behaviour’ continues to have on today’s Labour government. The somewhat depressing difference is that today the pushback from parents seems to be waning.
There is no denying that in the 20 years since I was a teenager, young people’s access to the internet and social media has changed dramatically. This will continue to pose challenges to parents for whom the sanctity of home life, with its private rules and structures, is challenged by a strange second world on a little screen. But these challenges are not insurmountable. Inviting the state to play guardian when it comes to their kids’ online access undermines the relationship between parents and their children. Secure and safe childhoods are built on the foundation that the people with your best interests at heart are mum and dad, not Keir Starmer.
We need to dial down the hysteria about children’s social-media use. Most children are using socials simply to connect – to post pictures of their pets, talk gaming or even just to have a group chat. It seems rather bizarre that the same government campaigning to give 16-year-olds the vote thinks they’re barely capable of navigating social media.
It’s on parents now to step up, step in, and start taking primary responsibility for their children’s ‘wellbeing’ again. If they don’t, the state will never leave us alone.
And Joe Hackett writes:
“If you’re under 16, you should not be watching this!” thundered Labour MP Jonathan Hinder as he introduced a recent video.
Any alarm that Hinder might have decided to pursue an unusual side-hustle quickly subsided as he launched into a generic call to ban under-16s from social media, which he compared to cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling.
I assume the analogy doesn’t go so far as to wanting us all to pay punitive taxes for our scrolling, or — as in the case of cigarettes — having adults gradually banned from social media over the course of the next century. Those of us deemed old enough to safely consume Hinder’s content will have to wait and see.
But Hinder is not alone. He’s part of a wider campaign, across politicians and the media, to ban — or at least heavily restrict — teenagers’ access to the Internet.
When Australia banned social media for under-16s in December, it was the subject of near-blanket coverage by the BBC, including a liveblog on the day it came into force. Such a ban is now Conservative policy, and Keir Starmer is publicly toying with the idea. The Lib Dems want to go further and ban 16 and 17 year olds from some sites. Meanwhile, Sky News gave a basically unchallenged platform to a campaign to ban smartphones, not just in school, but on the commute to and from school, based on the case of one teenager who was diagnosed with PTSD after being shown a violent video at school.
If it wasn’t obvious at the time (as I argued at the time, it was), it should be clear by now that the so-called Online Safety Act was little more than a gateway to further restrictions on the Internet, generally in the name of keeping teenagers safe.
It’s at this point that I should declare a slight interest: I am 31 years old. And before I entered Jurassic Park, I was, like most teenagers of my vintage (presumably including the 34-year-old Hinder), not kept particularly safe on the Internet. I turned 13 just when broadband got good enough that you could watch videos that consisted of more than eight pixels and didn’t stop every two seconds, so I’m old enough to remember back to simpler, more innocent times. I remember when age verification consisted of ticking a box confirming you were over the ripe old age of 13. I remember a time before paywalls and digital rights management got their teeth, when you’d leave the computer on for hours to torrent, painfully slowly, music you definitely had the right to own. I even remember rapidly working out how to bypass the parental controls that had been installed on my computer — which, and I swear this is true, I needed to do because I was doing a school project on ancient Egypt and virtually any site to do with that subject had been blocked as “occult”. Honest.
In short, when I was a teenager, the Internet really was the Wild West it’s often described as today — and it was great. Did I occasionally encounter age-inappropriate content? Yes. Did some things clearly need more barriers to stop teenagers accessing them? Yes. But did I, and most of my generation, turn out basically fine? I’d at least like to think so.
And I know that’s just my individual experience, but then again, much of the campaign for more restrictions on the Internet is driven by the experiences of individual teenagers and their families. It’s often lamented how, from generation to generation, kids have lost the freedom to explore the world due to safety concerns — which, if nothing else, should debunk Hinder’s ludicrous claim that banning social media for under-16s would lead to them going “outside, enjoying beautiful weather… talking to other human beings again,” instead of watching TV like kids actually did in the 1990s.
My generation saw their physical world compress, but we at least had the online world to explore instead; a bigger world where it was easier than ever to be yourself, try new things, and meet people who shared your interests or came from completely different walks of life.
The Internet gave millennials a freedom which we were stripped of in the real world. I find it sad to see that freedom, that right to roam, gradually being extinguished — this time not by parents but by force of law, usually channelled through big tech firms. This isn’t, of course, just about the Online Safety Act or the myriad efforts to “strengthen” it. It’s a trend that’s been going on for 20 years, driven by a combination of politicians and corporations. A vast array of small message boards catering to various interests have been consolidated into a small number of social media sites, a process ironically accelerated by the Online Safety Act’s regulations prompting a number of long-running message boards to close.
Social media itself was created as a means for ordinary people to communicate with each other, but has increasingly become a place to consume the work of celebrity “creators” the site’s proprietors think you’ll enjoy. They think that because most of what you do online is tracked, giving these companies a file on you that the Stasi could only dream of. Politicians and campaigners might think they’re fighting this shift, and fighting big tech in general, but in practice they’re working hand in hand to lay the final bricks around the walled garden.
What’s most alarming, however, is that this isn’t just a walled garden for the kids, it’s a walled garden for all of us.
The Online Safety Act already requires that, at least in most cases, adults who want to access certain content must supply a big tech company with a selfie or even a copy of their ID. In Australia, where social media users might particularly treasure their anonymity amid the introduction of sweeping speech laws, that applies to accessing any social media site. And we know that this information isn’t always secure.
Even anonymity might not protect your freedom of expression online for much longer. One proposal ultimately dropped from the Act, but very much not dead, is requiring social media companies to censor speech deemed “legal but harmful”. Perhaps the most concerning proposal, however, was buried in Sir Keir Starmer’s anti-misogyny plan, published late last year. The Prime Minister advocated “partnering with tech companies” to make it impossible for children to take, share, or view a nude image — which, of course, sounds great in principle. The problem is that it’s hard to see how this could be remotely possible without requiring basically every device in the country to constantly record what’s on everyone’s screens and cameras, and what’s in their private communications.
Unsurprisingly, tech companies have already been developing software like this for, one suspects, data collection and AI training purposes. Microsoft Recall, launched in 2024 and quietly installed by default as part of Windows 11, takes screenshots of users’ activity every few seconds. An unsurprising backlash forced them to make it an opt-in service (here’s how you can turn it off). But it’s hard to see how Starmer could achieve his vision without bringing it back on a mandatory basis across all operating systems.
Growing up, the Internet was thought of as the information superhighway, a world at your fingertips — and a free, decentralised, relatively privacy-friendly world at that. It’s increasingly becoming a panopticon ruled by a coalition of politicians and a handful of corporations — not just for under-16s, but for adults too.
The impulse to make the Internet safer for teenagers is understandable, but the right balance needs to be struck, and at the moment our leaders appear to have thrown all sense of balance out of the window. That balance urgently needs to be restored, lest the online world become the opposite of what it once promised to be.
It’s become very unfashionable to enjoy using the internet. What was once breathlessly celebrated as a tool for political liberation – who remembers the Arab Spring? – has since become the go-to scapegoat for all the world’s social ills. You have to be careful if you’re going to counter the dominant narrative in case you inadvertently advertise your support for child bullying, political extremism and AI-generated images of Keir Starmer in a bikini.
Responding to the complexities of the issue in the typically British fashion, politicians have been competing with each other to see who can ban it first. Morgan McSweeney got in early with his censorious Center for Countering Digital Hate. The Online Safety Act followed. Kemi Badenoch pledged that a Conservative government would prohibit the use of social media for under-16s. Labour’s Andy Burnham suggested his own party ought to follow suit, and at time of writing the Prime Minister has refused to rule it out.
I’m part of the first cohort to have spent a significant chunk of my pubescent years blinking at a screen. I know from experience the problems social media can bring: the unwanted exposure to violent and explicit material, the relentless amplification of bullying, the rewiring of the dopamine reward mechanism away from actual work towards simulated achievement. There is a grain of truth in even the most hysterical denunciations of the internet. But those who think they can just pull the plug are simply delusional about the world that young people are actually living in.
Try and remember your teenage years. Could you sum them up in a single word? If you’re being honest, I imagine you’ve chosen “boring”. I grew up in a perfectly pleasant provincial town with very little to do in it and it almost sent me round the bend. It’s hard to accept in hindsight, but it is for most an incredibly tedious period of life – there’s a reason that passing a driving test is such a lifeline. My stepfather once confessed his primary form of entertainment during his childhood in 1980s Romford was bouncing a rubber ball against his bedroom wall. That’s why social media was such a revelation for my generation: there was actually something to do in those long hours between school and bedtime, a way to access friends instantly even when far away.
I’ve noticed that slightly older people will drive themselves into fits of rage over the sight of young people playing on their phones. Why are they not outside, breaking into electricity substations or dancing in the blind spot of a reversing tractor like back in the Seventies? The truth is that the idealised wild childhoods of the like of the Mitfords haven’t existed for some time: the explosion in crime in the latter half of the 20th century put paid to the latchkey kid. With the streets off-limits, the only choice was the home.
Shutting off access to the online world – the ability to communicate effortlessly with friends, pursue niche hobbies without judgment, form soon-to-be embarrassing political opinions – won’t encourage children to go outside. What it will do is leave them at the mercy of the television. This highly-regulated environment provided children with the appropriate entertainment of Gary Glitter on Top Of The Pops. Because there were only four channels before the internet, if you changed the channel you might just end up watching Jim’ll Fix It.
What about other forms of entertainment? Isn’t reading still an option? Despite my online obsession, I managed to read extensively. This was always out of choice. But I worry what it would mean to force children to read who otherwise have no interest. Why should we expect them to pick up Chaucer? The only books that actually sell now are “Romantasy”, a genre about being ravished by fairies or vampires or goblins. This smut is currently marketed under the “Young Adult” categorisation, which makes Instagram better at maintaining childhood innocence than Waterstones. Anyone who knows their Austen ought to know any medium is capable of corrupting a young mind.
Is the use of social media any more objectionable than the creeping infantilism present in modern life, which pens the young in at every corner? The car that once provided much-desired freedom is now out of reach as Labour heaps unfair restrictions on learner drivers. Expressing an interest in Right-wing political issues like immigration might see you forced into the Government’s draconian anti-terror programme Prevent. Even alcohol-free beer might soon be off limits to under 18s, apparently in the worry that even the simulation of having fun might be too damaging.
Parents are twice as likely to spend time with their children than they were 50 years ago, despite a dual-income setup becoming the norm. That means that even as parents spend less time on average in the home, they pry into the lives of their children more than ever before. It’s not surprising that the outcome is endlessly-expanding worry. But it is deeply irresponsible for leaders to stoke these fears for the sake of a cheap political stunt.
Teenage children aren’t ignoring their parents because they’ve been hypnotised by a screen, but because they’re teenagers. Politicians aren’t being bombarded with criticism because of Elon Musk’s algorithm, but because they are widely despised. If you are concerned about wokeness, as Kemi Badenoch is, it makes little sense to agitate for shutting teenagers off from what might be the only alternative source of information in their lives. I certainly wouldn’t hold the political opinions I do today had it not been for the internet.
Parents must set their own boundaries and trust that, given the right support, their children will act responsibly. I can’t say that I was always responsible – quite the opposite – but the online world has enriched my life in ways that far outweigh the bad. If you’re not convinced, nobody is stopping you from logging off.
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