Don’t ban teenagers from social media and smart phones, ban boomers

During Prime Minister’s Questions, Tory galaxy brain Miriam Cates suggested that given increased rates of mental health issues, bullying, and addictions to pornography, it may be time to ban under 16s from using social media and smart phones.

It’s one of the all-time great contributions, in a long pantheon of politicians pontificating on issues which they do not understand.

I’m going to do Cates the service of treating her idea seriously, because she’s not the only one to suggest it.

Someone like Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, writes a lot about it, and is working on an upcoming book about the mental health consequences of widespread social media use for teenagers, particularly girls. And, by the way, he’s done it very transparently and diligently and is clear that the extent to which the scholarship actually supports the idea of a causal relationship is contested.

For people like Haidt, one solution they suggest is the introduction of age-gate filters to stop younger people from accessing social media. It is one of many possible solutions to an incredibly complex problem. 

Namely, if you believe social media is harming younger people, how do you go about regulating it or controlling it, given the complexity gap between the newsfeed’s ever-evolving algorithm, often aided by AI, and the capacity of a monolith like the EU to legislate around it? Because by the time that legislation has passed, the iteration of the algorithm they were acting against has changed three times and is irrelevant.

Back to Miriam Cates. 

There is a digital literacy problem here. Which is that people like Miriam Cates, like most of the people in parliament, do not understand the thing they are talking about.

They contextualise the internet in a landscape of incels, 20-man gang bangs, and Snapchat drug dealing. They don’t understand that social media is also a gateway to friendship, culture, consensual sex, education. No, not just education. Better. The sum total of human knowledge, accessible in seconds.

Let’s say you have a kid who is gay. And they grow up in an incredibly Christian environment. They’re told all their life that what they are is wrong and, possibly, that what they are can be cured, they can pray the gay away via conversion therapy, which, coincidentally, is an alleged-practice at the Sheffield church which counted Miriam Cates as a senior member of its congregation. 

I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you that kid would not be very happy in that environment. Simultaneously, they may find a community on the internet where they are accepted for who they are and, as a result, find expression of their true identity. No, you’re right, no Snapchat for them. Far better to read the bible.

Social media is a tool. It matters how you use it, like a knife. A knife can do terrible things. It is also quite difficult to dice an onion without a sharp one. 

The challenge for advocates of prohibition is to point to one thing for which a total ban has been beneficial. Alcohol in the 1920s? In the 2020s are we going to ban social media? And that’s saying nothing of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which enshrines their right to free expression and, by the way, says not a word about parental permission being relevant to that right. 

If you tell a teenager they can’t access something, whether it’s social media, alcohol or tobacco, you can make damned sure they will find their way to it.

This authoritarian tendency, not just within parenting but within our politics, to reflexively reach for a ban, is pernicious. All you do is drive it underground, away from parental oversight. Far better as a parent to open up a channel of communication with your child about challenging but important subjects like digital literacy, privacy, and pornography. 

A tangential but relevant digital literacy thought experiment: who is more likely to believe that Donald Trump is on a quest to destroy a cabal of basement-dwelling, Satan-worshipping paedophiles, or hand over their bank details to a Nigerian princess that pops up in their email inbox - the hypothetical child in question or their Facebook-brained parents?

If anyone should be banned from social media, it’s the Boomers.

I want you to cast your mind back to the heady days of freshers, and consider the individuals whose parents denied them access to alcohol, cigarettes and sex. Were they models of restraint and probity? No. They were being sick on themselves, conducting regret-inducing shags and ending up in A&E with broken fingers and possibly the clap. 

Here’s an idea for Miriam Cates. How about interrogating why these kids seek escapism? Why do they turn inward and online away from reality? What is it about their lives that they don’t like? Possible contenders: 29% of all UK children lived in poverty in 2022, access to further education hinges on accepting tens of thousands of pounds of debt, and after that they will return to living with their parents before buying a home in their early forties if present trends continue. And that’s to say nothing of the sledgehammer to their formative years between GCSEs and graduation when the government and parents imposed house arrest, literal cages at Manchester Uni, because of a disease which generally posed little-to-no risk to teenagers.

It is admittedly more difficult to try and break the drivers of bullying behaviour. That doesn’t mean we should ban the playground.

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