Kicking under-16s off the social platforms is tempting, but it ignores the root of the problem: the older generations who made them so toxic in the first place
K
emi Badenoch is evolving into one of those politicians who, whatever she says, it’s not just likely to be wrong, it’s likely to be the opposite of what’s right. She says Greenland is not a big deal (a “second-order issue” is how she described it to the BBC) – it is a big deal. She says net zero is too expensive – the opposite is true: net-anything-but-zero is a cost we can’t afford.
But her promise to ban under-16s from using social media, echoing Australia’s recent move, is hard to write off completely; people across the spectrum, including Andy Burnham, agree with it. Nobody who has ever met a teenager, or read the news, will be completely at ease with the role of social media in young lives. There are horrific effects, which have been well documented and inadequately addressed ever since the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing suicide and self-harm content online.
Many platforms, even those that seem anodyne, are purpose-built to spur anxiety, self-doubt, self-harm, anything that delivers attention. We have this completely contradictory environment in which a nine-year-old can’t walk to school alone without turning into grist for a radio phone-in about parental neglect, and yet tech companies with a record of generating emotional distress for profit are allowed access to children’s bedrooms. Grok can generate sexualised images of children on demand, and the UK government calls it a matter for Ofcom.
