Resist the social media moral panic

Over the last week, we’ve been told repeatedly that Netflix’s Adolescence is a powerful reminder of how quickly anyone can be radicalised by the content we consume — even when it bears little relation to reality.

Perhaps those people have a point — but not quite the thought they have in mind. After all, within days of its release, the Prime Minister was calling for Adolescence to be shown in all schools. The show’s creator, Jack Thorne, rapidly escalated to demanding a ban on smartphones for under-16s, then to demanding legislation “taking kids away from social media altogether”.

Meanwhile, amidst an outbreak of thinkpieces, the BBC drew a tenuous link between self-proclaimed “misogynist” influencer Andrew Tate, who is name-checked in Adolescence, and last year’s Southport massacre — although our national broadcaster ultimately had to acknowledge that there’s no evidence that the murderer even viewed any of Tate’s content.

One work of fiction appears to have sent our political and media class spiralling into a full-blown moral panic. But, as with many cases of radicalisation, the warning signs were already there beforehand.

In the space of a few weeks this year, the BBC’s flagship Sunday news programme ran two stories about bereaved parents calling for more restrictions on social media. Both sets of parents have also appeared on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, as has Southport’s Labour MP linking social media to the massacre in his town. ITV are set to air a documentary linking the murder of Brianna Ghey to “online safety”. The Sun recently ran a headline claiming that triple murderer Kyle Clifford was “warped by toxic Tate”. Multiple MPs responded to the assassination of Sir David Amess in 2021 by demanding laws against MPs being “vilified” online and anonymous social media accounts.

Social media has become a modern bogeyman

It’s increasingly hard to think of an atrocity or tragedy in this country that hasn’t sparked a rush to blame social media, or the Internet in general. It’s no surprise, therefore, that a recent poll commissioned by LBC to mark something called “Online Safety Week” showed 74 per cent of people supporting a social media ban for under-16s, and 83 per cent of parents worried that the Internet is harming their children’s mental health.

Perhaps more remarkably, most Britons apparently support mandatory warnings on social media sites like they have on cigarettes, and believe that social media “addiction” is at least as serious as drug or alcohol addiction.

Thanks in part to a concerted effort from mainstream media, politicians and NGOs, social media has become a modern bogeyman. It’s time to ask whether it really deserves its status alongside drugs, fags and booze as one of the great vices of our time, worthy of being strictly policed and kept away from children altogether.

We should ask, for example, whether there’s an alternative explanation for the Internet history of the perpetrators of the aforementioned atrocities: that these people were already deeply disturbed individuals, and their online activity was simply a reflection of that, rather than the cause.

The Southport killer, for example, had expressed homicidal thoughts and repeatedly taken weapons to school aged 13, five years before the massacre. Kyle Clifford started purchasing weapons for his attack on Louise Hunt and her family shortly after she broke up with him, and before he searched for Andrew Tate’s podcast — the judge in his trial did not allow the jury to hear about the search.

We should also ask more questions about other factors that led to these crimes. Brianna Ghey’s school was not informed that her eventual murderer, Scarlett Jenkinson, had been transferred from her previous school after spiking another student there. Clifford’s brother is also a convicted murderer. Rudakubana was reported to Prevent repeatedly over the years leading up to the Southport massacre. Sir David Amess’ assassin was an Islamist terrorist (and not an “online troll”) who had also previously been reported to Prevent.

We should, but we don’t. These debates are increasingly sidelined by the rush to blame social media — a rush which has now enlisted fictional murders to its cause.

But the moral panic against social media goes much further. The idea that it’s responsible for damaging children’s mental health, for example, has repeatedly been cited as justification for banning under-16s from social media or from having smartphones.

The actual evidence, however, is less clear. Children were already getting more anxious before social media. Most Western countries have seen no uptick in suicide rates amongst young people. On the contrary, there’s evidence that more perennial factors, like school stress and absent fathers, continue to play a greater role in children’s mental health.

The moral panic has extended to, at least implicitly, painting a rose-tinted picture of the world before social media.

It’s hard, for instance, to take newspapers too seriously when they talk about the impact of social media on mental health when those same newspapers, at their relative zenith of the 1990s and 2000s, were running headlines like “Bonkers Bruno Locked Up”. This was the same era as the “size zero” trend pushed by magazines and the fashion industry.

We are at risk of returning to a more gatekept media

If anything, the social media age has given people the opportunity to break down the taboo around mental health and to advocate for greater body positivity. It’s ironic that legacy media has jumped on those bandwagons to the point that they invoke mental health and body image as part of their campaign against social media.

Likewise, mainstream media in the 1990s and 2000s thrived off whipping up abuse against celebrities and intruding on their lives — paying handsome sums to paparazzi, putting footballers’ faces on dartboards and even, in some cases, hacking their phones.

The Internet, and especially social media, has given celebrities the chance to communicate directly with their fans and speak out against this abuse and intrusion, to the point where mainstream media has not only been forced to take notice, it’s now using those problems as a stick to beat social media with.

There are, of course, plenty of problems with the online world. Extreme pornography, online gambling and scams are all serious issues which deserve targeted action — although again, much of the best work highlighting these problems is found online.

But at a time when the Internet, and social media in particular, is being written off entirely as an all-purpose bogeyman, it’s important to correct the record.

We know what happens when we fail to do so. The so-called “Online Safety Act” has already snuffed out a number of innocuous independent forums, like the Hamster Forum and the London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed forum (ironic for a law ostensibly aimed at “Big Tech”).

Mainstream media, politicians and activists want to go further, imposing more restrictions on what we — not just teenagers, but adults too — can do or see online. We are at risk of returning to a more gatekept media and cultural landscape, with “Big Tech” dragooned by law into acting as its enforcers — one where many of the positive changes we’ve seen in the last 15 years might not be able to happen.

Opponents of this push are right to point to its potential impact on free speech, but that argument alone won’t be enough. If we want to keep all the good that the Internet and social media have brought us, then we need to remind people of that good and confront head-on the moral panic unduly blaming it for all that’s wrong with the world.

We might not get much of a platform on TV or in the newspapers to do that, but at least, for now, we can do it online.