Kemi Badenoch is evolving into one of those politicians who, whatever she says, it’s not just likely to be wrong, it’s likely to be the opposite of what’s right. She says Greenland is not a big deal (a “second-order issue” is how she described it to the BBC) – it is a big deal. She says net zero is too expensive – the opposite is true: net-anything-but-zero is a cost we can’t afford.
But her promise to ban under-16s from using social media, echoing Australia’s recent move, is hard to write off completely; people across the spectrum, including Andy Burnham, agree with it. Nobody who has ever met a teenager, or read the news, will be completely at ease with the role of social media in young lives. There are horrific effects, which have been well documented and inadequately addressed ever since the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing suicide and self-harm content online.
Many platforms, even those that seem anodyne, are purpose-built to spur anxiety, self-doubt, self-harm, anything that delivers attention. We have this completely contradictory environment in which a nine-year-old can’t walk to school alone without turning into grist for a radio phone-in about parental neglect, and yet tech companies with a record of generating emotional distress for profit are allowed access to children’s bedrooms. Grok can generate sexualised images of children on demand, and the UK government calls it a matter for Ofcom.
The asymmetry of acceptable risk between the real world and the virtual, even while we can see that online harms show up soon enough in lived experience, is inexplicable. It must be more baffling still if you happen to be under 16, working on the assumption that the adults telling you what to do must know what they’re talking about.
Even at the milder end, a lot of social media apps seem designed to mess with a young mind. Take the problems created by location services, whereby kids are able to see one another’s whereabouts 24/7, so discovering in real time what they haven’t been invited to and what their ex-best friend is up to; or the intolerable body-image pressure of a life lived in selfies; or the stress of the streak (a chain of back-and-forth messages or pictures), friendships torched by a slow reply.
In short, not everything is wrong with Badenoch’s idea; only two things. First, if there’s one thing more ridiculous than taking a corporate failure and throwing it to the individual to solve, by self-discipline reinforced by legislation, it is doing so to under-16s. If a corporation is selling radical misogyny and methods for self-harm – because what else are they going to do, disappoint shareholders? – that is not for a 12-year-old to fix by turning off their phone and taking up crochet. It’s not for a parent to fix, either, by instituting a load of screen limits and parental blocks; even if you enjoy that side of things, it shouldn’t be up to you to fill late-capitalism’s moral void. You could make the case for government intervention, but only if it had time on its hands after tackling the problem at source.
Second, while young people are unarguably the target of so much manipulative content, to discuss online risks without mentioning older people is frankly perverse. An X user recently asked Grok to identify misinformation super-spreaders on the site from the UK, and probably the youngest among them were Tommy Robinson, 43, and Darren Grimes, 32.. This was data crunched from Amnesty, Global Witness and the BBC, among others, and helpfully built a list of accounts most likely to promulgate untruth or conspiracy, with the caveat it was “subjective and depends on sources”: Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox, Julia Hartley-Brewer, George Galloway, Katie Hopkins, David Icke. None are of a tender age. Between Gen X miscreants and hyper-credulous boomers, there are generations that pose a greater risk to, and are themselves at risk from, the informational ecosystem. Any thinking politician needs to work out how to deal with them.
