As Keir Starmer announced his new social media ban for under 16s last week, the internet reacted with praise. There was a victory cheer amongst teachers and parents alike.
I understand why the policy was so well received. Social media is increasingly vilified as a harmful place and tech titans dismissed as toxic people.
Protecting children from social media feels right – a digital-free childhood inspires idyllic Enid Blyton-style scenes of outdoor adventures, scraped knees and den-building.
The realities of social media harm are, of course, much more complex.
It’s been almost two decades since I was firmly in my childhood. But despite being social media free it was certainly not Blyton-esque. In 2008, aged 14, I was visiting pro-anorexia websites, bypassing the age restrictions and learning dangerous dieting tips.
Of course, I shouldn’t have been accessing them, but did these websites cause my eating disorder? No. Did I learn diet tips that exacerbated it? Yes. Could I have found diet tips elsewhere – women’s magazines, friends, my mother’s coffee mornings? Yes. I share this to highlight the trouble with Starmer’s policy – the ban is the wrong answer because it fundamentally misdiagnoses the problem.
I have spent several years working with psychologists on digital wellbeing, body image, and policy and education initiatives to improve young people’s mental health. The evidence that social media causes explicit harm to teenagers is inconclusive. The reality is far more nuanced.
For the most vulnerable it is a problem. But a ban affects every young person. And the research shows this doesn’t reduce screen time (young people are smart, curious, defiant and they find ways around this – I did at 14).
Focusing on screen time alone is a poor predicator of harm, and an engagement with positive social media content can actually improve adolescent wellbeing.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the harm isn’t evenly distributed across young people. Despite gender differences being a dominant conversation in culture-at-large, these disparities appear to be omitted from this blanket piece of legislation.
While boys are not immune, the research consistently shows that adolescent girls are significantly more vulnerable to the impact of social media than boys.
What is more, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research points to the differences in the way girls and boys socialise online. Where boys tend to gather in online gaming or virtual worlds, girls are much more likely to use visual-based platforms like Instagram and Tiktok.
This is why the mechanism by which harm is caused is specific: appearance-based comparison is a huge issue, because this is how girls understand their own bodies and self-worth. These visual based platforms encourage self-objectification, and teenage girls are at a much higher risk of this.
Research shows that the more we self-objectify, the worse our mental health. Further, girls are more heavily incentivised by this and are more easily persuaded by social validation in the form of algorithmically-driven likes. The outcome of this can contribute to lower self-esteem.
Girls are more likely than boys to internalise bodily comparison as inadequacy, linked to rising eating disorders, anxiety, and self-harm since smartphones became widespread around 2012.
What adolescent girls actually need is digital literacy, gender-specific interventions and a culture willing to examine what it teaches them about their bodies, long before they pick up a phone. I’ve spent years working with psychologists and young people on exactly these kinds of evidence-based interventions. They do exist.
Digital literacy, rather than abstinence, empowers young people to be part of a digital world. Teaching them to be critical about the content they see on social media, learning about algorithmic bias and online safety, would be a far wiser approach than an outright ban. In 2017, France took action and made it a legal requirement for digitally altered images to come with a warning label. The UK did nothing.
Further, the Government needs to do a far greater job at working with social media companies on monitoring, censorship and removal of harmful content. Regulation is certainly not easy, but it is possible – for the last eight years Oversight Board has worked as an independent content moderator for Meta, yet few people know it exists. Co-operation is possible, if we’re willing to try.
The social media ban is driven by moral panic. In order to drive positive change for young people we must stop treating social media as a black box, and instead work more closely with these companies to implement specific and evidence-based policies which we know will improve teenage wellbeing.
Policy should be made on scientific evidence, not populist incentive. Otherwise we risk causing even greater harm to young people, and driving them towards darker corners of the internet. Just like the ones that I ended up in almost two decades ago.
The social media ban is the wrong intervention that puts political interests ahead of the millions of young women who need help the most.
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