Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has made an unlikely alliance with the teachers’ union and Labour’s Manchester mayor Andy Burnham by leading extraordinary calls on the government to ban under-16s from social media.
There is near-universal agreement on the problems with teenagers and social media. Many families will have struggled to wrench their children from their phones long enough to get through a roast dinner let alone a board game this Christmas. Many experts question whether teens’ brains are well developed enough to make the right choices about what to click, watch and share in a sea of unlimited content, or to navigate the dopamine-driven reward loops of scrolling, posting, and seeking likes. But aren’t millions of parents glued to their phones too?
Perhaps the most compelling argument for a state clamp down on the internet is that more young people than ever are being diagnosed with anxiety, depression and mental health issues. As a relatively new variable, social media is an easy target to blame for this newly unhappy and increasingly unemployed demographic.
But a government ban on digital socialising won’t help young people into work – at a time when digital skills are in the highest demand, quite the opposite. It is an extreme, authoritarian act of state censorship that would do nothing to prepare them for the digital world. And it won’t keep young people off social media any more than ID checks kept my own generation of now-30-somethings away from drinking, smoking and clubbing in the Noughties. Teens will steal credit cards and IDs, use VPNs to access sites via frankly more democratic countries, and piggyback adults’ accounts in order to access the sites they want to.
This is one of those policies that crumbles when it touches the real world. In reality, there is no such thing as a social media ban for under 16s. There are only digital ID checks for every single one of us.
It’s a Trojan horse for more surveillance and censorship online from a political class that has never known quite what to do with the incredible freedom that the internet gives all of us. For nanny statists, digital freedom is a problem to be solved, not a responsibility to be learned.
If the question is, do we all want young people to be safe and spend less time online? The answer is a fairly unanimous “yes”. But the next question we must ask is “and how”?
A government-imposed social media ban will fail to achieve this goal. It is essentially a policy to require Big Tech companies to undertake government mandated identity checks on each of us – an eye-watering mass data and surveillance risk that tips the balance of power even further away from the individual and kills anonymity online.
No wonder then, that Ms Badenoch’s calls for the teen social media ban this weekend were music to Andy Burnham’s ears. As the former minister in charge of ID cards in Blair’s government, he knows a thing or two about giant, intrusive, pointless identity systems. What kind of ID does a child have that will grant them access to an Instagram account on their 16th birthday anyway? Well, the Labour Government might be able to solve that problem – they are considering issuing us all digital IDs from birth. What an image of the British future. Kids can sign up to socialise online at the government-mandated age with their government-mandated ID, subject of course to the restrictions under the government’s Online Safety Act and the state’s speech arbiter, Ofcom.
The internet – indeed the future – doesn’t feel so free and open any more, does it?
Smaller social networks will simply have to shut down, unable to comply with increasingly onerous liabilities. Larger networks will have even greater power. After the Australian government introduced its teen social media ban, Meta culled 540,000 accounts believed to be under-16 within the first week.
We cannot underestimate the damage that ID demands and the death of anonymity online would have on our culture. The ability for people to speak frankly about uncomfortable and controversial issues freely online, especially during this time of culture wars and witch hunts, has allowed people to speak freely without risking their jobs or real life social circles.
And you do not have to think too hard before the risks of such identifiable social networking at a time of government overreach become frighteningly clear. The government could argue that only the tech companies will check our papers – but the state would inevitably have backdoors. Multiple surveillance laws from recent years give the government and even police various types of access to our internet records – and some would love nothing more than a set of passports to match with our tweets. Badenoch might believe that her policy merely shields teenagers from online harms, but in reality it means something much more sinister. As a politician who came into the limelight as a champion against censorship, I do not think she has thought this through.
– Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch Director
It is hard to think of another Conservative policy where the state so clearly adopts a parental role, taking agency away from families and businesses in order to make decisions for them – let alone a decision as sensitive about how they can socialise and what information they can access. It would entail not only a significant narrowing of the public square but considerable expansion of the state. I will never give my children unfettered access to the internet – but I want to parent them my way and at my own pace. I don’t want the government bungling it up for me.
The uncomfortable truth is that parents need to step up. I am starting to think the problem isn’t really with our young people, but with the adults in the room. Badenoch admitted this weekend that she finds herself losing time scrolling on Instagram despite being both a parent and the Leader of the Opposition. It’s understandable – but if we are to raise our children to have a healthy balance between the digital and physical worlds, we must lead by example. Censorship is no example for us to set at all.