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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