CROYDON COMMENTARY: The government wants stronger controls on how under-16s use their phones. KEN TOWL welcomes the move
Dialling up disaster: are international trillionaires placing their profits ahead of the safety of our children?
We are arming our kids with weapons we hardly understand and, up to now, the rules around these weapons have been principally written by profit-driven transnational companies rather than by democratically elected politicians.
This month, however, in the face of a wide political consensus, the Labour government has published details of its proposed “Landmark Social Media Ban” designed to limit the companies’ access to under-16s.
The government plans to use the same model as has been implemented in Australia, stopping access to user-to-user platforms whose purpose is to enable social interaction by allowing users to post material. The ban will include Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.
The government will also look at overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18s.
The political consensus reflects that of the British public. Labour claims that 9-in-10 parents support a ban. The Bill will be brought before Parliament later this year, with the key protections expected to come into force in spring 2027.
Sir Keir Starmer has said “we’re going further than any country in the world by banning social media for under-16s and putting wider protections in place to give kids their childhood back.
“This is a line in the sand. Tech giants had their chance and failed, but we’re stepping in to protect children, back parents and set a new normal for future generations.”
It is about time, and we all know this. And I am not over-stating this by referring to “weapons”. Social media weaponises childhood. Children die. Research from the Molly Rose Foundation this year suggests that more than one-third of 13-to-17-year-olds “continue to be exposed to high-risk, suicide, self-harm, depression or eating disorder content on a weekly basis”.
The algorithm is merciless. It is designed to be merciless. It is designed to seek out and damage susceptible young people.
Slaves to the machine: it is time that adults stepped up over the use of social media, by youngsters – and themselves
When the Prime Minister (for now) says, “Tech giants had their chance and failed”, he is referring to the Online Safety Act 2023, which required the global tech giants to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content.
These platforms are run by people like trillionaire Elon Musk, the self-declared “free speech absolutist” who, apart from his apparently deeply held commitment to freedom of expression for people who agree with him, stands to become even richer the more access there is to X.
Musk’s beliefs are in line with the right-wing philosophy that we are all responsible for our own actions and do not need “protection” from potentially harmful or offensive content. However, even libertarians accept that children merit greater protections than adults.
Musk must be aware of the young casualties of the social media age. His failure to act may be down to a desire to believe that this is an example of correlation rather than cause and effect, or it may be down to a desire to make more money regardless. So, take your choice – is he inept or evil? Either way, I am sure we can all agree that Musk is hardly best-placed to make objective decisions that put the welfare of children first.
It’s not all about life and death. I teach in a large state secondary. I see the relationship that young people have with their phones every working day. Like most schools, mine does not allow children from Year 7 to 11 (11-to-16 year-olds) to access their phones during school hours.
When the bell goes at 8.45am to summon them to get in line in the playground ready to walk into their classrooms for registration, that is the signal for them to put their phones away. Any phones seen out after that will be reported and a detention given. On the whole, the system seems to work.
One of my duties at school is to greet students off the buses that bring them on to the site. The buses usually arrive 20 minutes or so before the call to registration, so phones are still permitted. I make a point of saying “Good morning” to every child who alights from the buses. Most of them reply but some are engrossed in their phones as they step down from the bus and so do not acknowledge (or even realise) that they have been welcomed into the school.
Mobile phones, for some, are barriers to socialisation. And not just for children but for the adults they grow into, too…
Yesterday afternoon, in the street in Addiscombe, a young mother, talking loudly into her mobile, passed by me with a daughter in tow. The girl was maybe five or six years old. As they passed, the girl asked her mother a barely audible question. The mother barked: “I. Am. On. The. Phone!”
On the tram a couple of years ago, I saw a young mum who, after a fashion, appeared to have sorted out how to use social media. Her two children, looking about three and five, each had a 500g bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. To be clear, 500g is more than a pound in weight. Her texting went uninterrupted as her two children sat in a chocolate-induced stupor, painting their faces and clothes with brown sticky goo.
Back to school. At the end of the day, the bell goes and the phones come out, 1,200 phones in 1,200 pairs of hands, while 1,200 children check their accumulated messages and start work on the replies. Twelve hundred children who have spent the past few hours socialising, talking, listening, learning about mathematics and language and life, suddenly bury themselves en masse in a virtual world and become detached from the vibrant reality around them.
This is the behaviour of addicts. This is what Musk and his like are knowingly doing to our children. This is what algorithms do, what they are for.
The one phone-free space outside of schools for under-16s is school trips. Every year my school organises a week of camping for Year 8 pupils (12- and 13-year-olds) with a programme of activities such as mountain biking, kayaking, zip-lining, archery.
It is a highlight of the year and it is designed to be affordable and nearly all pupils attend. It is a revelation for them and for all of the staff (who camp alongside them in loco parentis) because, in the absence of social media, these young people find themselves turning into the children that they are.
They chat and laugh and run around and play. It’s not always about life and death; it’s about childhood.
Next month, I have the privilege of supporting an educational trip to Tanzania. My colleague, the leader of the expedition, has recently contacted parents to explain that, in line with school policy during the school day, and also in order to promote greater engagement of the students with their surroundings, there will be no mobile phones allowed.
Anticipating parental concerns, my colleague goes on to explain that there will be a school phone that their children will be able to use to make calls and also that they will be included in a specialised app that will allow them to track their children’s whereabouts wherever we have wifi coverage.
The children are encouraged to bring cameras. The app will also allow children to upload photographs and comments for all the parents to see. So far, only two out of 20 sets of parents have expressed concerns and these appear to have been somewhat assuaged by my colleague’s responses.
I wholeheartedly agree with my colleague’s decision. Imagine how depressed you would feel if, as herds of wildebeest swept majestically across the plain of the Ngorongoro Crater, you looked across at the kids in your charge and they were oblivious, busy playing Fortnite or shaping a virtual neighbourhood on The Sims4.
So, yes, I support the government’s latest proposals. They add the teeth that are needed in the face of Big Tech’s inevitable reluctance to limit their own capacity to make a profit. The proposals might even save lives, and they will also enhance childhoods.
And then, once we have looked after our children, perhaps we should look to ourselves and our own toxic relationships with social media.
- Ken Towl is a regular contributor to Inside Croydon
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Just a way to indoctrinate kids with left wing propaganda as Bluesky has magically been excluded…
Maybe an answer could be to not use X/twitter by role models in our society, HM Government/local government et al. Another answer could be to implement the second report of the Leveson inquiry. Yet another answer could be to legislate so to bring social media platforms under the same umbrella as the press, tv, radio etc and view them as publishers. These answers will not solve but may assist in solving.
You’d think a government that has legislated against the destructive effects of the cess pit formerly known as Twitter would remove itself, all taxpayer funded organisations and its entire party from X. But then Starmer is such a blithering, dithering, useless pillock