One social media ban. Two reactions
I'm Ben Whitelaw, the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation*. I'm standing in for Alice in this week's Trust & Safety Insider.
I had a topic all lined up for yesterday's newsletter. Unlike some weeks, it was written and ready to go. And then the news about the UK's under-16 social media ban broke.
The reaction to it — particularly the split between parents and internet policy experts — left me feeling bewildered. And so I've tried to capture what felt odd about it and why it's not dissimilar to the other great divisive policy moment of my lifetime (Happy 2016 referendum, by the way).
Hit reply or head to the comments on the EiM website to share your take - where do you sit on the ban? What unintended consequences will this have? And, dare I say, what can we learn from the parenting campaigners who made this happen? As Alice often says, here we go! — Ben
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Two sides of the same debate
Yesterday morning — as many EiM readers will be aware by now — UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer announced a social media ban for children under 16.
Having followed the debate since the Online Harms White Paper (EiM #21), through the rocky passage of the Online Safety Act (EiM #286) and into the parent-led backlash, the timing was not a shock. Media briefings have made clear that ministers have been moving in this direction for months and Starmer’s recent performance in other parts of his premiership has necessitated action.
And yet I still felt genuinely disoriented by the response to the news.
On LinkedIn, the announcement was met with caveats and with big “what now?” questions. The Molly Rose Foundation reiterated that the ban did not “remove the risks children face online” while other children’s rights groups asked whether the consultation had been properly weighed and urged the UK government to get wider input from children and independent experts. Academics pointed to a thin evidence base and said the ban didn’t “solve our collective concerns about the increasingly digital childhoods experienced in the UK today”.
The tone was very different elsewhere. On national TV, parents of children who had died after harmful social media experiences sat in the studio reflecting on years of campaigning, grief and being ignored. It was an emotional and difficult watch.
In the WhatsApp groups of the Smartphone Free Childhood, the campaign group that coordinated many of the 116,000 responses to the UK’s recent social media consultation, it was pure celebration:
“This is phenomenal news for our children and future generations. It’s still sinking in. But one thing is clear: this simply wouldn’t have happened without the hundreds of thousands of parents who spoke up, got organised, supported one another and refused to accept that the status quo was the best we could offer our children. In short: it wouldn’t have happened without this community.”
I found the next 12 hours wholly disorienting. Not because people disagreed — that was to be expected — but because there seemed to be so little shared understanding of what problem had been addressed.
Parents were describing a loss of control and a feeling that family life had changed beyond recognition, while policy experts were attempting to figure out how implementation and enforcement might work. Many people straddling both worlds explained how torn they felt.
Both reactions make sense. With my EiM hat on, I instinctively share many of the concerns about a ban. The evidence is not particularly strong. There is a risk of pushing young people into less visible spaces. Not to mention that the ban arguably leaves the underlying product incentives intact.
And yet, you can’t deny that the ban meets a real need: validation and collective support for parents who have struggled to have conversations with their children and felt anxious, isolated and increasingly lost as a result.
My one-year-old has — somewhat surprisingly, given the way he puts our TV remote to his ear — not asked for a smartphone or demanded to be on Instagram or Snapchat. But, even after paying close attention to this space for almost a decade, I don’t know how I would have coped with the struggle to grant him online independence while maintaining his safety. Most likely badly.
It reminded me, as too much does, of the UK’s other great divisive policy of the recent age: Brexit. Obviously, the substance is different but the lesson from the 2016 vote, when Boris advocated and the bus misstated, was not that one group of people are wrong and another is right. It was that one often talked about processes, and impact and trade-offs and the other spoke in terms of frustration, control and the need to be heard.
The social media ban in the UK — and most likely elsewhere too — seems to be a similar story. One group is asking whether intervention will prevent better safety outcomes. The other is shouting about why it took so long for this prime minister — or any of the many UK governments that have promised to fix online harms since the 2019 white paper — to do anything about it.
Some may know each other or have met at conferences, roundtables or perhaps even parliamentary events. But yesterday, it didn’t feel like it.
Until they do, until the people with organising power meet those who understand why a ban isn’t a silver bullet, we’ll keep getting internet policies that are more eye-catching than they are actually operational.
Member discussion