I happen to believe that the vast majority of screen time afforded to children is fine. Their brains are not being irretrievably warped by technology and I haven’t read any meaningful evidence in any scientific literature that disputes this.
This doesn’t mean some age limits aren’t perfectly appropriate, nor that smartphone bans in specific schools or other educational environments aren’t sensible. Present me with a petition banning loud or distracting phone use in cinemas or public transport and I’ll sign it so quick your head will spin.
It’s just that the answer to the harms of phones or social media – moderating children’s feeds with care and attention, while doing our best to clean up the sewage that litters the online world for all of us – seems so clear that the notion sails right past common sense and all the way toward insultingly obvious.
I mention all this because, as I write, the UK is mooting a different solution: a near-total social media ban for 16-year-olds, with many agitating for something similar in Ireland. That the British Medical Journal released a paper just last month confirming that Australia’s social media ban for under-16s has had little to no effect on any of the problems it was ostensibly brought in to combat appears to have made no difference.
Social media bans are popular because they seem pleasingly dramatic to those of us who have neuroses about our own screen time, and wish to launder them as concerns for children’s safety. They’re also a “free hit”, since the adult population are slow to be moved by the harms such bans might cause children, and governments care even less since they exclusively affect people who can neither vote nor put money in their coffers.
A serious approach to mitigating online harms is possible. Such measures are, in fact, already enshrined in laws we refuse to enact. We could hold tech companies materially responsible for the bile and misinformation they spread. We could institute moderation and controls, with severe legal and financial penalties, for platforms such as X that profit from the spread of child abuse imagery and racial hatred. We could improve media literacy by teaching our children how to spot slop, misinformation and spam in the wild, perhaps teaching ourselves a little about that task in the process.
[ With the UK set to ban social media for under-16s, what is next for Ireland?Opens in new window ]
Tech giants are materially invested in all the worst aspects of the modern web. The hatred, the bile, the scams and the misinformation all exist because someone somewhere is making a lot of money, influence or political capital from their existence. It’s in their power to change it, and I believe it’s in ours to make them do so.
Increasingly, however, it seems like we’ve decided to punish our children instead, banning them via processes that will not make the web safer for any of us but will – surprise surprise – allow those very same tech companies to make an additional killing by implementing age verification.
The current UK recommendations suggest social media blackouts for under-16s, with a further “curfew” mooted for 16- to 17-year-olds, restricting access to their accounts after a certain time of day.
Never mind that we are asking young people to be isolated from services and platforms now so intrinsic to modern life that they are how most of us get all our news and entertainment, maintain social relationships and acquire employment.
Never mind that bypassing these restrictions will be so elementary as to be pointless, with the added benefit of criminalising kids who do so. Never mind that a 16-year-old in Britain might soon be legally eligible to fight and die in a war but not to watch a YouTube video after dark.
[ Screen time can damage under-twos’ development, landmark UK study warnsOpens in new window ]
Let me put it another way. We, the careful, sensible adults of the world, allowed developers to take over a state-of-the-art public park, and they’ve filled it with scorpions.
These developers are in the scorpion business, and doing this makes them very rich. Some of us have been saying for quite some time now that the scorpions are a problem, that the developers should face repercussions for introducing them or should at the very least be forced to remove them.
Instead, our governments hand them lucrative contracts to add more amenities, more services and, yes, tens of thousands more venomous arachnids. And each time we suggest we could create a public space that’s safer for everyone, the government’s solution is to ban children from entry, while giving the developers extra cash, and photos of every child in the country, to make sure none of them sneak in.
As we face the most pointless, draconian and fact-free punishment of future generations ever devised, here’s a thought: might it be better to simply get rid of the bloody scorpions?
