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Our children’s feelings are not for sale, and nor are they to be manipulated.
So said Emmanuel Macron this week, after French lawmakers voted to ban under-15s from social media. Admittedly, he then repeated these sentiments in a post on X, in the time-honoured manner of parents solemnly lecturing children to do as we say, not as we do.
Yet Macron is not wrong. The backlash building up against social media now is unmistakable, as guilt over all those hours wasted scrolling meets growing alarm at the ugly and dystopian world big tech has helped create. Only last week the Labour MP Jess Asato, a government adviser on violence against women, described how an X user had created an AI-generated video of her being chloroformed and prepared for rape. Who wants their 14-year-old daughter hanging out somewhere that happens? Though teens mostly prefer TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat to X, it’s the grim excesses of the platform under Elon Musk that have shaken many adults out of complacency.
Parents are beguiled by tales of Australian kids rediscovering bike rides and board games, after under-16s were banned from social media just in time for the antipodean summer. Teachers sick of dealing with the fallout from adolescent social media beef, or the inevitable after-effects of kids staying up all night on their phones, want action. The surest sign of which way Labour winds are blowing, meanwhile, is that the health secretary, Wes Streeting, recently invited the pro-ban campaigning author Jonathan Haidt in to address officials, while the thwarted leadership hopeful Andy Burnham suggests a crackdown makes sense to him. Yet Downing Street has hesitated, leaving Kemi Badenoch to take advantage, for once, of an open goal. The Conservatives have amended the children’s wellbeing and schools bill going through the House of Lords in order to put the idea of a ban on the table, and will use an opposition day debate this Wednesday to hammer their point home, somewhat awkwardly for Labour MPs who broadly agree with the idea but don’t want to see the Tories take the credit.
Personally, I wasn’t convinced for a long time of the case for a ban. What changed my mind was realising how gen Z, now old enough to reflect on growing up in a social media free-for-all, feels about it. Half of 16- to 24-year-olds wish they’d spent less time on their phones and three-quarters want tougher regulation to protect young people from social media, according to recent polling for the thinktank The New Britain Project. When teenagers themselves say that they’d keep their own future children away from it for as long as possible, alarm bells should be ringing. And, though some will of course find enterprising ways around a ban, in itself that’s not an excuse for doing nothing; there’s a booming trade in fake ID for underage drinkers, but we don’t just give up and let 14-year-olds drink until they black out. Legislating on teenage harms is less about prohibition than setting social norms until they’re old enough to regulate their own intake, and protecting them from industries otherwise only too ready to exploit them.
That said, the ongoing government consultation on teens and social media should be given the time and space to consider more serious objections. Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly tragically killed herself after viewing endless images of self-harm on Instagram, has made a thoughtful case that the Online Safety Act (designed to outlaw the most egregious material) should be given a chance to work. Children’s charities, including the NSPCC, are worried about teenagers banned from the big platforms experimenting with riskier alternatives, and about the cliff-edge potentially created for kids let loose at 16 on social media with little experience of it. (Though the more countries follow Australia’s example, the greater the incentive for platforms to do what the former Meta executive Nick Clegg advocated when I interviewed him, and create teen versions of their product. Companies tend to innovate remarkably quickly when facing an existential threat to the business model.)
The most powerful argument against a ban, however, is that it’s not the easy answer to a teenage mental health crisis some want it to be. The evidence is still so mixed that it’s unclear whether being glued to a phone makes children miserable, or whether miserable teens spend more time online seeking comfort. New research from the University of Manchester, tracking 25,000 children, finds no evidence linking heavier social media use or gaming in one school year with increased anxiety and depression the next.
Yet the researchers didn’t conclude that social media was harmless: more that teenagers are complicated, and that adults should pay more attention to what they’re doing both on and offline. Age limits for social media could fit alongside properly funded children’s mental health services, more things for teenagers to do away from a screen – the recent government announcement of funding for youth clubs was a start – an honest reckoning with what else threatens children’s wellbeing, from poverty to academic stress, and some uncomfortable questions about parenting. If a four-year-old is already so online that they try to swipe a book rather than read it, as a survey of reception teachers for the charity Kindred Squared recently reported, that’s not big tech’s fault.
A ban is not, then, a panacea. But it ought to be part of a broader national mission for happier childhoods, which recognises that as a society we have for some time been asleep at the wheel. It’s not too late, even now, to wake up.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
