In defence of social media for kids

In recent weeks, there have been continual conversations about children’s internet use, and in particular whether it’s appropriate for children to use social media. Australia banned social media for kids in December, and there’s talk about the same thing happening in the UK. The Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to implement a 'crackdown' this year. Exactly what such a crackdown will entail remains to be seen, but there’s been talk about a full Australian-style ban, as well as proof of identity required for VPN use (which would defeat the whole purpose of a VPN, the appeal of which is that it’s totally anonymous). It is, of course, also debatable whether Keir Starmer will still be Prime Minister long enough for this to even be implemented, but it seems a public enough conversation that the same may be pursued by any potential successor.

I’m admittedly extremely biased when it comes to this whole discussion. I’m 32 years old. I was part of the first generation to routinely use the Internet in primary school, have been using social media almost daily since I was 14, which is the majority of my life. I have been writing this blog since I was 17 and started becoming politically active (and my earliest blogs are so cringeworthy I can’t even bear to read them anymore - I leave them up for posterity and as a record of how far I’ve come, but like most people I am a little embarrassed by the sort of thing I used to say, even though my overall politics and views haven’t changed all that much). I can’t really imagine my life, including my childhood, without the Internet and social media. For that reason I have to be really cautious with expressing a view on this matter - I always have to ask myself, ‘Are you quite sure you aren’t looking at things through rose-tinted spectacles?’ Especially when we have multiple testimonies from teachers attesting to the fact that social media is ruining children’s lives.

Another thing that I have to acknowledge is the myriad of problems with social media. A few months back I was discussing the situation in Australia with one of my oldest friends, who is Australian and ironically whom I reconnected with on social media when I was 15 - I brought the situation up with that person largely because it felt strange to think that nowadays we may not have been able to do that. My friend had quite a nuanced view, and definitely gave me more understanding of how it is in Australia, but one specific thing they said stayed with me: 'Social media is not what it was fifteen years ago.' And it absolutely is not. Social media nowadays has suffered very much from what is called enshittification - the phenomenon by which online products steadily decline in quality after their initial push to get new users. The Wikipedia article has quite a detailed analysis of how and why this happens. We've had many social media scandals, most notably the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016, in which online dark ads influenced the outcome of the EU membership referendum. Personally, I rarely see much of what my friends actually post these days unless I actively seek it out - targeted adverts are shown to me instead, and there's no way to change your settings to stop that from happening. And more recently, social media is becoming increasingly infested with AI bots. Just today, I was reading something about how AI could be used to continue to post on behalf of a person who has died, which I think almost everyone would find quite sinister - I have doubts about whether that would be cost-effective for the social media companies in terms of server space, but I really hope this isn't something that's practically on the cards!

But there are quite important things about social media as well, that I don't think we always appreciate. For me as a political writer and campaigner, many of my most important campaigns are things I only learned of due to my social media accounts. Andrew Feinstein's election campaign against Keir Starmer in 2024, and the subsequent movement of independent candidates across the UK of which my partner Owen was part, came about because of a number of conversations on social media. I think social media gives us an opportunity to talk to people who have very different backgrounds and experiences to us, which in real life we don't always get. The Gaza war, for example - it's only been in the last couple of decades that we've been capable of talking in real-time to people who actually live in the war zone, to hear what they have to say without it going through journalists first. I've done that myself, although probably not as often as I should have done, and it's been illuminating in a way that just consuming media from the mainstream is not.

I also want to talk about how it feels to be a teenager. Picture this. You're fifteen years old. It's 11.30 at night. Your family have gone to bed. Because of your teenage hormones, you don't happen to be at all tired, so going to bed is a bit fruitless. All of a sudden, you're struck by crippling loneliness and depression. You want to talk to someone. You can't speak to your family - they're asleep, and you're increasingly of the opinion that they don't really understand you anyway. What you really want is a friend - but you can't call anyone at this time of night, that would be rude.

I think everyone who has ever been a teenager can relate to this feeling, especially since nightlife for teenagers, such as youth centres, were cut in the austerity drive of the early 2010s. And what I found really helpful at that age, and to an extent still do, is that there's a handy tool that tells you who is online, who might be free to talk. And I have had important instances of this not just facilitating my ability to talk to people who are already my friends, but to people who I only know vaguely. Sometimes this can result in more fulfilling conversations than you'll have face-to-face. There's no peer pressure, no one to question why you're talking to this person, no cliques - just two people, a computer screen and what organically occurs. I think that's something essential. I think that's something that previous generations lacked the ability to do, and that we should cherish.

I also want to talk about cyber-bullying. Cyber-bullying is a horrific thing, as all bullying is, and I don't want to downplay the seriousness of cyber-bullying. However, that doesn't change the fact that it is not quite as bad as other forms of bullying. There are two very specific reasons for this. The first is that it tends to be a little easier to escape from bullies online - you can block them, delete their messages and then that's that. The second, and this is quite an important one, is that if someone cyber-bullies you, you can prove that it's happening. You can keep screenshots of horrible messages, and show them to someone who will do something about it. This isn't something you can normally do with other forms of bullying, which very often don't happen in front of witnesses and therefore can't be proven. I don't think our constant obsession with cyber-bullying is really rooted in what will concretely keep children safe. I think what this is actually about is overprotective adults being concerned that children's experiences are not things that they can personally relate to, and therefore know how to deal with. In the past, bullying was often restricted to the school playground, so at least adults knew that it wasn't happening when their children were at home. But that doesn't necessarily make it better. I remember when I was about 17, my father (whose view on kids' social media use I don't believe I have ever asked) laughing and saying to me, 'George, I can't believe that you've never been in a fight!' This was my father's view of what teenage boys do to one another, and something that he presumably wouldn't consider to be a serious case of assault. Why is that a more healthy experience for a child to go through than a string of unkind messages online, which can at least then be shown to others so that something can be done about it? I see no reason that it is, apart from that it makes adults uncomfortable.

One thing that has struck me quite a lot in this whole conversation is the way both the media and the Government are taking advantage of Esther Ghey. Esther Ghey's 16-year-old daughter Brianna was murdered in 2023, in a deeply transphobic attack that originated online (and her murderers' online behaviour, and the text messages they'd sent to one another, was part of the prosecution case against them). Ghey is one of the top campaigners for kids to be more restricted on social media. To be clear, I have the utmost respect for Esther Ghey. In every interview I've seen with her, she has been far more restrained, composed and considered than I'm sure I would be if I'd been through what she has. I have no doubt that if I lost a child in such horrific circumstances, I'd be saying exactly the same thing as she is. But Brianna's tragic murder is not the reason we're having this discussion about social media. Brianna died not because of social media, but because of transphobia. There were transphobic murders, and murders because of other protected characteristics, before social media. The most high-profile case of a prejudiced murder of a teenager was of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence in 1993, the year I was born, and people didn't have social media then. Social media doesn't cause racism and it doesn't cause transphobia. All social media does is amplify the feelings we already have and put them on a wider platform. If those feelings are racist or transphobic, then we need to do something about that. We need to have these conversations and amplify a different message about dark-skinned people, or about transgender people, or whatever the characteristic is. Banning social media for kids won't stop transphobic attacks - in fact, it may make them more common, because it will mean that trans people and trans allies will be less easily able to find one another and build supportive communities. I think most LGBTQ+ kids, one of which I was, will attest to the fact that when you're first coming to terms with who you are, it's often far easier to learn how to do that online than it is in a physical space. It is disgusting that the Prime Minister and the media are taking advantage of a grieving mother of a trans child to try to further an agenda they already have, and which might in itself harm trans kids, when they are also consistently spreading a transphobic narrative and bringing in guidance that actually furthers transphobia.

In regards to the various issues with social media that I spoke of earlier - I do not believe they are any safer for adults than they are for children. And this kind of approach by the Government says something about their relationship with social media companies and big AI tech - namely, that they are completely cowed by them. Their attitude is ultimately saying, 'We can't do anything about big tech. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk can do whatever they like. We aren't strong enough to take on people with that amount of wealth. So we just have to protect children from getting caught up in it.' And this won't protect anyone. How are adults meant to have a healthy understanding of how to use social media appropriately if they didn't learn this when they were growing up? How can we have faith in our abilities not to get sucked into unhealthy AI use if our Government is more willing to restrict our own ability to use it than to restrict its engineers' abilities to use it for harm? Not to mention the complicated range of legal issues this could cause. If, for example, an underage child is groomed by an adult online, in most cases it is rightly assumed that the adult knows the age of the child, and therefore was committing a serious offence. But if children were banned from the platform, and a child who was using it undercover was groomed, what then? Could an abuser quite justifiably say, 'I didn't think they were underage, I thought everyone on this platform was an adult'? Could this actually get a predator off the hook?

I don't necessarily know the answers to all these questions - it's impossible to until we're confronted by the reality. But they are conversations we need to have, and a lot of the time they're conversations that we aren't having. A lot of the discourse comes back to, 'Social media is really dangerous, no one should be on it unless they're over 16', and that is far too basic a position to hold for such a complex issue.

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An open letter to my local MP, Labour's Catherine Fookes, on the importance of jury trials

Dear Catherine,

My name is George Harold Millman; I am a writer and social justice campaigner based in your constituency, and I write about politics under the blog name The Rebel Without A Clause. You probably remember me, as we have met a number of times, and my partner Owen was one of your fellow candidates in the 2024 General Election. Both of us have fond memories of your kindness and encouragement, so I hope very much that you'll be with me on the very important matter I'm going to write to you about.

As I expect you know, the group who in August 2024 infiltrated the Elbit Systems factory in my home town of Bristol, popularly known as the Filton Six, were within the last week acquitted by a jury at Woolwich Crown Court of most of the criminal acts they had been charged with. I think if we are not to beat around the bush, we must both acknowledge that this verdict is somewhat inconvenient for the Government, as its case for proscribing the campaign group Palestine Action in July last year was largely based on this particular case. Your Labour colleague Yvette Cooper, who at the time was Home Secretary and is now Foreign Secretary, commented at the time that the logic behind the proscription would become clear throughout this trial.

I myself am opposed to the Palestine Action proscription and have done my best to stand against it. I don't want to debate that with you just now because I know that there are ongoing legal challenges to it, as well as a number of hunger strikes taking place by people imprisoned as a result, and I wouldn't want to prejudice the outcome of that. However, one thing I really hope we can agree on is that the verdict reached by the jury at Woolwich Crown Court was legal, and taken after having seen far more of the detailed minutiae of the evidence than either you or I have. If there's any doubt about that, I very much recommend Jonathan Cook's analysis of the case (if you're more of a listener, the audio version is narrated by the journalist Matthew Alford), as well as the defence speech by barrister Rajiv Menon.

I wanted to start by referencing this case because it's a particularly interesting recent example of the role of juries in our criminal justice system, and how essential they are to a fair trial. A jury of our peers, that cannot be instructed by a judge or the state to reach any particular verdict over another one, is the only defence we have against misuse of our criminal justice system by the state, whichever Government is in power at any particular point. Juries are composed of our peers, which gives them something more in common with the defendant than judges, lawyers or politicians typically do. When I was a student (both as an A-level law student and as a Creative Performance undergraduate at the University of Essex) I attended a number of court cases for research purposes, and I witnessed first-hand the crucial work that juries do. I have often wondered what it would be like to serve on a jury; I obviously have no control over whether I ever am, but if it were to happen I would consider it an incredibly important responsibility, and one I would take extremely seriously.

This is why I have been dismayed by Justice Secretary David Lammy's proposals to scrap juries for all but the most serious of criminal trials. The justification given for this is that there is too much of a backlog of court cases that we need greater efficiency in getting through. There are two major concerns I have with this. The first is that I am gravely concerned about people's essential human rights, such as the right to a fair trial, being tossed to one side purely for matters of efficiency (there are many important instances as to why jury trials are necessary, but as you were once the chair of Women's Equality Network Wales, I thought you may be particularly interested in this one from Independent Domestic Abuse Services (IDAS), a charity that specialises in domestic violence cases). The other concern I have with this idea is that I do not believe it will actually concretely address the backlog at all. The backlog is caused not by the existence of juries, but by successive Conservative Governments failing to properly address a number of issues with our criminal justice system. In fact, abolishing juries may potentially lead to even more of a backlog, because there may be more miscarriages of justice and therefore more retrials. You may like to read this article by The Secret Barrister, which suggests a number of more effective measures to deal with the problems Lammy raises.

Our justice system certainly isn't perfect, and nor are juries. Juries, as a randomly selected sample of the public, are fallible. Miscarriages of justice have happened in the past, and will happen again. However, they are a necessary cornerstone of our criminal justice system. They do offer an opportunity for the evidence on offer to be examined by a number of people, and a number of people who could not possibly have any ulterior motive. At the very least, they're likely to represent a higher proportion of women, working-class, LGBTQ+, ethnic minorities and disabilities than judges, magistrates or lawyers are, something I think is highly important in a world where we're becoming increasingly aware of privilege divides within our society.

Please will you reassure me as your constituent that you are with me on the importance of jury trials, and that you will use your voice in Parliament to protect them, including from your own Labour colleagues if necessary?

Best wishes,
George Harold Millman

P.S. Please be aware that as a political writer and blogger, I will be making this an open letter, publishing it on my blog, The Rebel Without A Clause. I will do the same with any reply I receive from you, along with my comments on any such reply.

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I sent this letter on 8th February 2026. I will make public any reply, if any, I receive.

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What if Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim?

 Within the last week, the (partial) release of the Epstein Files (a large collection of documents, images and videos detailing the social circle of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who took his own life in 2019) and the sorts of people named in them have sent shockwaves around the UK and the world. It probably isn't necessary for me to mention the names of the politicians and celebrities mentioned in them, simply because it's been so heavily reported on that the biggest culprits seem pretty widely known without my help. I haven't personally got a great amount of information about the content of the Epstein Files aside from the snippets that are being shared around so it's not really my place to speculate too much on the individual detail until I'm more informed - but, I think we can agree that it's quite evident that substantial numbers of very powerful people, if not sex offenders themselves, were at least aware of and associated with people that are/were.

As usual with this kind of thing, I would argue that the shocking thing is not sexual offences committed on children (that should be shocking, but unfortunately it happens so often that it simply isn't). The shocking thing is the level of cover-up involved in this. I've always been fascinated by the Jimmy Savile scandal, and again, the thing about that that deserves talking about and remembering is not the horrific things that Savile did (which truly are horrific, but they're a matter for the unfortunate victims and survivors). It's the fact that huge numbers of people knew about it. During Savile's lifetime, many people tried to report his behaviour, and they were ignored, disbelieved and/or silenced. One testimony that has always stayed with me, ever since I first read it, is of a man who as a child was molested by Savile in his dressing room after a recording of Jim'll Fix It. The man recalled that during the ordeal, the door to the room opened as someone started to come in, and then hastily retreated again and closed the door. This to me is indicative of how much of an open secret his predatory behaviour was. If you walk into a room where an adult is abusing a child, there are three things that can happen: 1) You don't notice what the adult is doing and continue with what you're doing; 2) You notice what the adult is doing and immediately intervene; or 3) You notice and fail to intervene. This is the third one. Someone who didn't notice, or didn't know what a child alone with Savile in his dressing room meant, would not have immediately retreated - they'd have come right in and carried on with what they'd intended to do. Retreating means that you know what is happening, and you're taking the decision to let it carry on. To this day, not one single person has been convicted of anything in relation to the fact that Savile's child abuse was allowed to carry on.

I want to focus on something else here though. On a Facebook discussion post recently, I came across someone observing, 'Can you imagine how different this would have been if Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim?' It's quite clear what they meant. Much of the media and many right-wing politicians, most notably Nigel Farage, continually talk about Muslims as though they are likely to be child predators. Muslims tend to be othered as a threat to British society (whatever that is anyway, I'm never clear) and are frequently used as a political football in conversations about important things like war, refugees, climate change and child abuse. For that reason, instances of sexual assault and paedophilia tend to be discussed far more prominently by politicians and in the media on the occasions when the perpetrators happen to be Muslims than when they aren't.

So, it's understandable to think that if Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim, the kinds of politicians who make up Reform UK and the Conservative Party would be talking about this far more than they are, right?

Well... no. Not even slightly right. If Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim, certain regular people who subscribe to these schools of thought might be bleating about it a little more to justify their own racism, but I do not believe there'd be any difference in the kind of coverage this is getting from powerful people who have platforms at all.

To explain this, we need to look at race, racism and the purpose of racism (and, for that matter, of other forms of discrimination). Racism does not discriminate equally against everyone with a certain characteristic. That's not what it's for. It's not even about the characteristic itself, that's just a smokescreen. It exists to other people. More than that, it exists to pit ordinary people against each other and cause us to be distracted from the fact that we are all continually overlooked, used, gaslit and systematically having our lives destroyed by the most powerful 1% of people. The way to perpetuate abuse is to make sure that the abuse is not all received to the same extent for everyone. The world is a little bit easier to navigate if you're white. It's a little bit easier to navigate if you're male, and if you're heterosexual, and if you're cisgender, and if you're able-bodied. So if you're all of those things, you're laughing because the world is great for you, right? Wrong, because the operative bit here is 'a little bit'. It's not that much easier if you happen to be a straight, cisgender, white, able-bodied man in the UK, just slightly easier than it would be if you weren't those things. Which means that people who don't happen to be straight, cisgender, white, able-bodied men start to overestimate the amount more privilege these people have than they do. And then that feels a bit uncomfortable for those people, who can come back with, 'Well, my life's not really that much of a walk in the park myself, how dare you talk about white privilege?' And then different factions fight amongst each other over who has slightly more scraps. Meanwhile, the people who are actually doing the oppressing, the ones who are allowed to go on TV and talk about whichever talking point is more likely to get people so riled up in the first place, are allowed to get off scot-free. These people exist in an entirely different society to the other 98%.

At any given point, there's some kind of scapegoat for all of society's problems, and right now it tends to fluctuate between Muslims and transgender women (and, incidentally, Muslims and trans people are pitted against each other in this as well - I've heard political figures talk about Muslims and how lacking in understanding of LGBTQ+ communities they supposedly are, and then go and talk about how trans people are getting out of hand the very next week). At the moment, for whatever reason, these groups of people are an easy target. But there are also instances of people like that who aren't being attacked, because they're in that 1% of people who don't count. A good example is the ban from entering or re-entering the United States for nationals of a number of predominantly Muslim countries, which Donald Trump presided over during his previous term in office, supposedly in the name of preventing terrorist attacks. Most of the countries on the list had never been associated with terrorist attacks on US soil. But there was one predominantly Muslim country that is far more closely linked with terrorism than any of these countries and was conspicuously absent from the list, and that was Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia is a wealthy country, with some of the largest fossil fuel reserves in the world, and plenty of powerful oligarchs that Donald Trump and various other powerful individuals in the US and elsewhere have business interests with. These people aren't the scapegoats, even if they do happen to be Muslims. They exist in the echelons of society populated by Donald Trump, and Peter Mandelson, and Jeffrey Epstein, and all the rest of them.

So if Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim, or if he'd been a trans woman, or had any of the other characteristics that tend to make people become a scapegoat, it wouldn't have counted for him. He was One Of Them, and what constitutes One Of Them is far more about the amount of power and control someone has than about what physical, racial or sexual characteristics they have. It only counts for ordinary people on the ground, to make them turn against each other and forget to stand up against oppression in general.

I really hope that the release of the Epstein Files gives us a chance to finally stand up to some of the most powerful people in our society (and that doesn't just mean politicians and media pundits, it means celebrities too - celebrities very often cause just as much harm if not more, and anyone who doubts that should look no further than JK Rowling). I'm optimistic in the sense that I think this leak has caused us all to talk more about how much harm these kinds of powerful individuals inflict on society, which I think is a conversation we all need to have. But I also think we probably haven't seen anything yet. Not all the files have been released, and there seem to be such an enormous amount of people involved that I think the full knowledge of these things would cause us to have to completely dismantle and rebuild our society. And to an extent I think our society needs dismantling and rebuilding, and probably has done for a long time - but we also have to be aware of the number of things that can go wrong with that. To move forward, we need open dialogue and to listen to people's feelings of betrayal and confusion, and I hope that this blog can help with that.

I hope, so much, that this is the beginning of something.

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