‘Our children are suffering’: Calls for a ban on social media to protect under-16s

Many parents of digitally obsessed teens must have wished they could throw away their smartphones. As evidence mounts about the risks of social media, public calls for better protection of children are growing – with some now even calling for a ban.

The debate in Britain has gained new resonance in recent days after Esther Ghey, the mother of murdered teenager Brianna, added her voice to those highlighting the dangers of smartphones.

“We would like to see a law introduced so that there are mobile phones suitable for young people under the age of 16,” she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg last Sunday. “So if you’re over 16 you can have an adult phone, but if you’re under 16 you can have a kid’s phone, which won’t have all the social media apps that are out there now.”

In demanding tougher action against big tech, she echoed other grieving parents who believe social media played a role in the loss of their children – including Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly killed herself after seeing harmful content online.

Ghey’s intervention came days after social media bosses, including Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, faced intense criticism in the US Senate over their companies’ role in facilitating child sexual exploitation and drug use. He told them, “I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through.”

Some US lawmakers are already going further than castigating the titans of big tech: the conservative state of Florida is debating legislation aimed at banning under-16s from using social media.

In Britain, reports before Christmas suggested that Rishi Sunak is considering tougher restrictions on children’s use of social media – although the new Online Safety Act, which has been in the works for years and aims to protect children online, is still a work in progress is.

A government spokesman said ministers were focused on the law, but added: “We will always look at ways in which children and other internet users can be kept safe online.”

Tory MP Miriam Cates, co-chair of the New Conservatives caucus of MPs, recently called on Britain to follow Florida’s lead with a social media ban – warning that “ordinary mums and dads are completely ill-equipped to to do battle with the giants of the world.” Meta, TikTok and Apple”.

The calls for a crackdown come amid a growing body of evidence about the dangers of unfettered access to social media.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory statement last year warning “growing evidence that social media use is associated with damage to young people’s mental health.”

He cited a study showing that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media are “double the risk of poor mental health outcomes, such as symptoms of depression and anxiety.”

Another American academic article, that the spread rollout has been mapped out of Facebook on college campuses against student health data, showed that the social network’s arrival coincided with “increased symptoms of poor mental health, especially depression.”

Despite the acknowledged dangers, few experts and campaigners the Guardian spoke to believed that a complete ban on the use of social media by under-16s was workable or even desirable – although everyone agrees that tech companies need to do more.

“The people we really want to take responsibility for ensuring children are safe online are the technology companies,” said Rani Govender, senior policy officer at the NSPCC.

“We completely understand why so many parents and families are concerned about this, but we think the question keeps coming back to the question: How can we make these apps, these games, these sites safer for kids?”

She points to the importance of implementing requirements in the Online Safety Act so that companies can take a tougher approach to enforcing minimum age limits for creating social media accounts, which are widely ignored.

Media regulator Ofcom is in the process of publishing codes of conduct detailing companies’ responsibilities in this and other areas.

Lady Beeban Kidron, who campaigns for children’s rights online, says there is understandably a focus on removing harmful content from apps – but policymakers should also focus on their underlying design.

“What we need to focus on is: why do we allow companies to give addictive products to children? There is no reason on God’s earth why they should be designed to be addictive. That’s a business decision,” she says, adding: “You actually have a defective product here: they have to fix it.”

That would mean looking under the hood of popular apps and rewiring the algorithms responsible for hooking teens — and in some cases radicalizing them.

Just this week, academic research suggested that video-sharing app TikTok would serve increasingly misogynistic content to boys seeking content about loneliness or asking questions about masculinity.

“Algorithmic processes on TikTok and other social media sites target people’s vulnerabilities – such as loneliness or feelings of loss of control – and gamify harmful content,” warned lead author Dr. Kaitlyn Regehr, who conducted the study in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Kent.

A TikTok spokesperson dismissed the findings, stressing: “Misogyny has long been banned on TikTok and we proactively detect 93% of the content we remove for violating our hate rules. The methodology used in this report does not reflect how real people experience TikTok.”

Andy Burrows is an advisor to the Molly Rose Foundation, set up in memory of Molly Russell to campaign for change. He warns against the temptation to cut off social media completely for children who have to learn to navigate the online world.

“The idea of ​​raising the drawbridge may seem like an attractive and easy solution at first glance, but I think it may have unintended consequences, and in particular the risk that the risks young people face when they go online will be postponed and perhaps even increased. ” he says.

Deana Puccio, a former New York prosecutor, conducts workshops in schools to help teens tackle issues like sexual harassment and negative body image, including dealing with the onslaught of social media.

According to her, the role of parents and schools is crucial. “This is about all of us, and the social media companies, working together, and having an interdisciplinary approach to recognize the fact that, yes, our children are suffering more than ever from mental health issues – anxiety, depression, body image, self-image. damage – because of what they see. There is no sign-out time,” she says.

Puccio, co-founder of The Rap Project with broadcaster Allison Havey, praises the growing number of schools that now ban smartphone use. But she adds: “The problem is that if we want to restrict or ban it, all adults have to be on board – and that’s not the case. Children don’t get this in a vacuum: we give it to them, as a society.”