Don’t clobber under-16s with a clumsy social media blanket ban

The British like a ban. It’s a treat, like the Beckham saga earlier this week. It cheers things along during hard times, makes us feel like we’re all in it together and that we’ve clawed back an element of control. It’s black and white and easy to grasp.

What we struggle with more is nuance. This is how my generation grew up with a deep fear of quicksand, sparklers, railway lines and the Bermuda Triangle, none of which has impacted our lives as much as we imagined.

The internet and social media, however, very much have – hopefully positively, because we have received no guidance in how to use them wisely. Not from our parents, who were figuring out how to use it just as much as we were, nor from successive governments, who realised how useful it would be to speak to people where they were, and didn’t put much more effort into establishing whether people having totally unfettered access to absolutely everything in the world, without basic training or media knowhow, was a great idea.

I smoked and drank well before my GCSEs, partly out of boredom, partly because teenagers will always find a way around a thing if they want to, however stupid they otherwise are and often because of this. It took me a decade of smoking, and a decade still more of alcohol, before I banned them for my own use, having established that I was using them to blank out boredom and negative feelings rather than actively enjoying them – plus, you know, cancer.

So too, I have had to educate myself in what is real on social media; people may say something to earn money through outrage clicks, scams, and wider deceit, or they may edit their face and body to unrealistic levels. This is not clear when you first go online – not just to the young, but to our elders, as was evidenced by the number of parents sharing scam posts on Facebook in the early 2000s. It is not widely discussed that this is what a tranche of our own politicians are doing to earn money by posting on X. And algorithms, too, need understanding, especially when they are controlled by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

The House of Lords’ unanimous backing for the government’s planned ban on social media usage among under-16s this week made me sigh.

What is missing throughout this whole conversation is nuance. Phones and social media are not inherently bad, but they require education and media literacy to use well. The panic around them is a clear descendant of the “satanic panic” of the 1970s, while the anti-gay revulsion of the 1980s and 1990s, which harmed so many people, including heterosexuals, because ignorance is not bliss, can be clearly mapped onto the new Section 28 laws around the trans community. And on that note, not everyone is lucky enough to have friends or family who share their interests or who understand them. At their best, social media and the internet can be places of safe harbour, community and learning.

Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly died by suicide in 2017, aged 14, has long campaigned for better social media protection for children rather than “sledgehammer bans”. The Molly Rose Foundation, launched in her memory, along with the NSPCC, Parent Zone and Childnet, has criticised a proposed ban for creating “a false sense of safety” that would see “children – but also the threats to them – migrate to other areas online”.

Unsurprisingly, a ban is preferred over action, given the kitten-like response by the government to Elon Musk’s Grok AI making naked images of women and children. Why are politicians and senior bodies still engaging on a platform that facilitated the distribution of naked images of children?

Ironically, this would be an excellent topic for parents to discuss with children to develop media literacy. They would also benefit from going through accounts and trends together, just as they work on the Highway Code when their children approach the age of learning to drive. Two of the best films I’ve seen on understanding the broader impacts of social media are the documentaries Embrace (2016) and Your Fat Friend (2023), which provide the media literacy education that parents and schools should, but don’t always, provide.

We need to show children how to use digital tools wisely, and how to recognise signs of grooming and when something isn’t real. But this is a sort of training that adults require just as much. Whether political, sexual, or ideological, grooming is done with hints and nods, just as if you were joining a cult. And it works best on people who don’t know how the sausage is made.

It is beyond time that the government instituted proper checks and balances for social media usage, no matter your age. Everyone should learn about what is going on underneath the bonnet of something we use even more often than a car.