Hey, Starmer, leave those kids alone

We will continue to regress as a society until we learn to judge new legislation by its likely consequences rather than by the intentions of its advocates. The looming ban on under-16s having access to platforms “whose purpose is to enable social interaction and  which allow users to post material” has all the hallmarks of another government failure. It has already been tried — and failed — in Australia. It is being framed as an attack on Big Tech rather than its satisfied customers. It has been pushed through by the conflicted old media off the back of a narrow selection of bereaved parents who have been used a human shield against criticism. It seems designed to give Starmer a “legacy”.

These are all red flags. So too is the familiar refrain that the ban will not be a “silver bullet” and that the public should therefore brace themselves for further restrictions. (Many of the problems the ban is supposed to address were meant to have been solved by the Online Safety Act. Remember that?). In his early morning address to the nation, Starmer urged us to not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Teenagers sometimes drink alcohol, he said, but that was no reason not to ban the sale of alcohol to children. 

Fair enough, you might say, but leaving aside the fact that children can legally drink alcohol in Britain from the age of five, reducing some teenagers’ access to social media is clearly not perfect, but is it even good? The consequences of Australia’s “world leading” social media ban have been largely ignored by those who seek to emulate it, but any attempt to create evidence-based policy must start there. The Australian government’s eSafety commissioner found that 70 per cent of parents said their children still had active social media accounts three months after the “social media minimum age” was introduced. If, like Wes Streeting, you think that social media is as bad as tobacco, this sounds like a modest but non-trivial improvement, but who are the teenagers being denied this means of communication and what platforms are the rest using? 

Evidence from Australia is still emerging but the concern is that those who are unable to use websites that the majority of their peers are accessing illicitly will suffer from social isolation. In many cases, these are kids who are marginalised and unpopular in the first place. As for the rest, there are plenty of ways to get around age restrictions. Facial recognition software has proven to be laughably easy to bypass in Australia and there is nothing to stop a parent setting up a phone in their own name and giving it to their child. VPNs are readily available and other interactive spaces that boomers are less familiar with have been growing in popularity in Australia as alternatives to the mainstream networks. 

The problem with many of these options is that they lack the guardrails that are currently available to parents. Using standard, pre-installed software on any iPhone, parents can set the number of hours their children can use their phone, control the time of day that it can be used, ensure that the content they see is family friendly and shut the phone down completely. None of these safeguards are available if the child is logged in as an adult or using an unregulated website via VPN. This is why the Molly Rose Foundation has warned that the “the unintended consequences of a social media ban for young people” could be “substantial”. Even UNICEF has warned that it could “backfire”.

What I have learned from my relatively laissez-faire approach is that the kids are alright

I hate to start a sentence with “speaking as a parent”, but speaking as a parent of a teenager, I have wrestled with the problems and opportunities posed by social media. Of course I worry about attention spans getting shorter and fewer books being read. I, too, miss the days when 14 year olds spent their summer holidays playing video games and spent their time after school drinking cider and setting off fireworks. On more than one occasion I have urged my daughter to come downstairs so we can watch television like a proper family, lecturing her about how we didn’t have all this Snapchat when I was growing up. But the world moves on. What I have learned from my relatively laissez-faire approach is that the kids are alright. Early exposure to social media seems to have given my daughter and her friends a degree of justifiable scepticism about things that are said online that many of their elders could learn from. It has not suppressed her desire to socialise one bit. On the contrary, it has been a complement to it, and a cure for boredom. 

Incidentally, she laughed when I told her about the social media ban and asked sardonically if it would work as well as the ban on disposable vapes. This is, of course, only my personal experience and opinion — my “lived experience” — but that seems to be all that matters in policy-making these days.