For months, the UK has felt like it’s barrelling towards banning under-16s from social media.
Spurred on by Australia’s ban, campaigners and MPs have brought the idea of a teenage ban into the UK’s mainstream, and now the government is consulting the public on what it thinks should happen.
Among adults, it’s a popular idea; a YouGov poll found that nearly three-quarters of UK adults want to ban under-16s from social media.
It’s easy to understand why; we’ve reported on countless horror stories of parents finding their children dead in bedrooms after being exposed to harmful content. We’ve covered sextortion, child sexual abuse, blackmail and more, all happening on social media platforms.
It’s reached the point where people impacted by these nightmare circumstances have had enough; if these companies can’t be trusted to look after our children, they say, we need to take them off the platforms.
But this isn’t a cut-and-dried case. There are a lot of people worried about the impact of social media on children who argue a ban isn’t the right idea.
Take Professor Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge psychology researcher who has studied the impact of social media for years.
He said there is “zero empirical evidence” to support a ban, and recently wrote a piece in the science journal Nature arguing against it.
“Blindly instituting wholesale bans for teens takes the ‘evidence’ out of evidence-based policy,” he argued.
But he isn’t saying that things should just stay the same.
In fact, he wants children as young as four to begin digital literacy education to protect them in the future and, crucially, wants social media companies to be held more responsible for building safe platforms in the first place
That’s what I was repeatedly told when researching the case against a social media ban.
Girl Guides, protesters, the chief executive of the NSPCC – they all believed that social media companies should be forced to change their platforms rather than young people being forced to come off them.
“These issues don’t [just] affect teenagers,” 15-year-old Imogen said. She’s a Girl Guiding advocate, one of three speaking to me after a Girl Guiding poll suggested just 15% of teenagers support a ban.
“Someone in their 30s isn’t going to want to see the violent content that teenagers are seeing, so it’s not solving the issue.”
“If we put a ban [in place], then that’s just saying we’re the problem,” said 16-year-old Freya. “It’s our fault when actually it’s their algorithms, it’s the way that they’ve made their platforms.”
One protester, Hannah from Mad Youth Organise, told us her group wants companies to pay a 4% “misery tax” to fund mental health services and mitigate the damage they say the companies have caused.
But the other argument against a ban isn’t about changing how the companies work, it’s about the impact on young people themselves.
Prof van der Linden said the impact of social media varies between different groups of young people. Those with pre-existing mental health issues are more likely to be harmed by algorithms than those without.
People who use social media to compare themselves negatively to others or “doomscroll” are more likely to suffer consequences than those who don’t.
In fact, using social media to connect with others or engage in social issues could have a positive impact on mental health.
He says it’s more nuanced than arguments against alcohol or tobacco, where the impacts are only negative.
And for certain groups, social media has become a lifeline.
LGBT+ teenagers, for example, face higher levels of loneliness, bullying and isolation, and when community can be hard to find in person, they now often turn to social media, according to Simon Blake, chief executive of Stonewall UK.
“It’s a place that they meet other people, it’s a place that they see people like them that they can aspire to, to see others and to ask questions and to get support in a world where they may not be able to get it from other places,” he said.
There’s concern from organisations like Stonewall and the NSPCC that young people will simply migrate to other, less regulated platforms where they could see even more harmful content.
“You can’t block the whole internet,” pointed out Kashuf, a 19-year-old Girl Guiding advocate.
No matter where the UK lands in the government’s consultation, campaigners on both sides agree something must change – the argument now is what that change should be.
