Social media ban for kids: Why is Starmer stalling?

0:00Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse? Paycor's intelligent HR solution empowers leaders to turn down the pressure. Their unified platform includes payroll, talent management, compliance software, and a lot more, connecting you to the people, data, and expertise you need to drive long-term business results. Visit paycor.com slash leaders and go from workflow to workflow. That's paycor.com slash leaders. This is a Global Player original podcast. Whether or not to ban social media, or at the very least more heavily regulated social media for the under-16s, it seems really strange.

0:43The idea that Keir Starmer wouldn't get behind it because there is a political win to be had there quite quickly. We're not saying ban kids from using Google. Go and search things up. There's no way Biden administration should have allowed Elon Musk to buy X. I take my cues from Professor Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation. He suggests 16. I think that's a prudent step. I think that that doesn't mean that kids are completely mature at 16. But the worst cases of social media addiction that I confront in my law practice are the kids that have gone online and gone on social media when they're 8, 9, 10.

1:20I think that is a time when they have very, very little impulse control, where their brains are really in a state of development. When kids get to be 16, I think they have more fortitude to resist the addictive elements and more strength going forward. I think that would be a productive step. That's Matthew Bergman, the campaigning lawyer who's taken on YouTube and met us, speaking to us yesterday on The News Agents about why there needs to be a social media ban for children under 16. There are about a dozen countries now set to age-gate social media accounts. Should Keir Starmer be getting ahead of the game?

2:02Welcome to The News Agents.

2:08The News Agents It's John It's Maitlis It's Lewis and this question of whether or not to ban social media or at the very least more heavily regulate social media for the under-16s it's one of those political issues that in amidst all of the geopolitics that is going on is easy to overlook but it could be transformative for good or ill and certainly changed the way that childhood has developed in this country in recent years. And today, the Commons will vote on the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill after the House of Lords tabled an amendment with regards to a proposed social media ban for under 16 and sent it back to the Commons.

2:51So this is something that is being led by the Conservative peer, Lord John Nash, to emulate, to follow Australia's lead, which is the country in the world which has the most comprehensive ban or prohibition on social media or most social media platforms for the under 16. And he has been leading this campaign and consistently laying down amendments to relevant bills, including this one, the Children's Wellbeing Bill, to try and get the government to act on it. The government opposed the clause and sent it back to the Lords in March, only for peers to once again insert Lord Nash's amendment and return it to the Commons.

3:32MPs, as I say, are going to vote on it today. Keir Starmer in the past has said that he has some scepticism with regards to the idea of a complete ban and instead favours regulation through existing legislation like the Online Safety Act. But it is certainly true to say that the politics on this has been moving very fast indeed, with none other than Kemi Badenock, indeed, the Conservative leader, recently coming out in favour of a ban as well. So it is a very live political issue in Westminster at the moment, with lots of Labour MPs as well keen on the government to take action. It's also the case that the overwhelming sense of it among public opinion in the UK is in favour of a ban, with polls saying that 72 % of British parents back an under-16 social media ban, two-thirds of adults overall back a ban, while half of 18 to 24-year-olds also think that under-16s shouldn't be able to use social media.

4:26In those circumstances, it seems really strange, the idea that Keir Starmer wouldn't get behind it because there is a political win to be had there quite quickly. And so, you know, I mean, I know there are arguments about kind of liberties and freedom and is this the right mechanism, but you'd think that he would want to move quickly to get to the place where somehow, whether by new legislation or expanding existing legislation, you can do it. Look, is it time, I think, three minutes into this podcast to mention the Overton window? Because this seems to me to be a real classic case. We need to have some spirits or something.

5:02We need to conjure them. We need to conjure them. Maybe we have a light part of the studio. After five minutes, it starts flashing red if we haven't mentioned. If we haven't mentioned the Overton window. But it does seem to me this is a classic example of where the public is ahead of legislation, the public is ahead of their own leaders. and actually the Kemi Baden-Ock position is really interesting because conservatism, conservatives, normally come from a place where it's hands-off. You know, we don't like the nanny state, we don't like you telling us what to do, you choose for yourself, show a bit of social responsibility, show a bit of self-governance and we'll let you direct the way and what's so interesting about this is I think it reflects a kind of powerlessness that parents in particular, But as you've said, you know, a lot of adults in general feel about the situation we have got ourselves into with the social media companies.

5:57I mean, Jonathan Haidt, who your guest mentioned, the American writer. Interestingly, you know, a decade ago, he was writing books called The Coddling of the American Mind, as if to say, you know, we're slightly too sort of cotton wooling of our new generations, our students. I mean, there's been a big shift there, right? because he is now at the forefront of this sort of age implementation. And it's interesting that he doesn't call it a ban. You know, he says we don't say that nightclubs are banned for kids or cigarettes are banned for kids. We just say there is an age at which this can start to work and it certainly isn't nine or ten or eleven.

6:38I suppose the other argument that is made is not just about seeing stuff as an adult, that you, you know, seeing stuff as a kid that you don't need to see, it's about seeing a view of the world that you don't need to be aware of, whether it be pornography or whatever it happens to be. It's also the sense of distraction that people can't focus anymore because they have to be looking at their phones the whole time. And, you know, for the under 16s, you talk to publishers now about crisis in publishing and they all talk about children's literature, that they can't ship books anymore because the kids are not interested in reading books because they want to be on their devices the whole time.

7:15And I think that that is a kind of a more fundamental point. Would you call it addiction? I mean, does it feel like a form of addiction? I think it does feel like a form of addiction when people are scrolling through, you know, TikTok videos or what's on Insta. And that's the point that, you know, the guy made yesterday when he was talking about the fact that you've got young people now for whom this an underdeveloped mind where this is an addictive quality, just like tobacco was an addictive quality, for other people. Now, not everyone's going to go on to develop lung cancer, but an awful lot of people are going to develop addictive-style behaviour when they're deprived of their devices.

7:52That's true. I mean, I would say that there's plenty of evidence to say that there are plenty of people of all age gaps completely addicted to their phones and who, again, are suffering from the kind of attention deficit that, you know, perhaps we're associating with children. Obviously, children are particularly exposed because of the development of their minds by comparison. I mean, it's absolutely true to say that clearly parents are very, very concerned and incensed about this. I mean, the government's position so far is basically to say they're having a consultation on it, and that's going to run until May the 26th.

8:23I mean, that's been running, I think, for three weeks. They've had 30 ,000 responses from parents and children in that time. And, you know, government responses do not tend to elicit, or consultations, I should say, do not tend to elicit that sort of, you know... Generate that kind of... No, generate that kind of reaction. So it's clearly something about which there is, you know, real concern. I have to say, I do slightly worry that our sort of knee-jerk reaction so much in politics is to sort of start talking about prohibitions and banning. And I do hear what you're saying, Emily, is, you know, we don't necessarily talk about that with regards to other elements of children's lives.

8:56But nonetheless, these apps and these and phones and that version of digital life, it has become a big part of childhood. And it's a big part. It's going to be a big part of that adulthood. You know, you know, unlike smoking, for example, like I think this is where some of the comparison with smoking sort of falls down. You can certainly say we don't want children to get addicted or to to be exposed to smoking young because they will be exposed. They'll become smokers when they're older. There's no doubt that kids are going to end up having digital lives on their phone when they're 16 or 18 or 21.

9:25Right. There's not going to be a kind of very few of them are going to go into adulthood and decide I'm not going to use any of these apps at all. I do think it's worth looking at what's happened in Australia because it is the most comprehensive kind of band so far. It hasn't been running for that long. The evidence, I think, so far there is mixed in terms of how effective it's been. Enforcement, it seems, is pretty weak. There are studies which have shown around 60 % plus of under-16s are still using social media, despite the ban. That is as a result of the companies themselves not taking sufficient action to prohibit the kids from getting access to them.

9:58But also, kids, guess what? Tech-savvy kids, the most tech-savvy bit of the population, are very good at getting around these things. they use fake ages, VPNs, parents accounts usage has fallen according to the studies so far only slightly marginal drops in usage so the bans haven't dramatically reduced exposure there are some reported benefits there have been some polls which suggest there's been better engagement with family, more in person interaction and so on but also potentially unintended downsides because you're potentially seeing a shift to less regulated platforms which do exist online and obviously there are benefits as well and Keir Starmer has spoken about this for kids in terms of being socially connected and finding online groups and so on.

10:36So I think it's fair to say that so far there isn't strong evidence that these social media bans actually work, but we do have strong evidence to say that they're quite hard to enforce, they're easy to bypass and probably are going to produce quite mixed results. I suppose the other thing is that you look back at legislation where there has been popular public support for it. Dangerous dogs, they need to be banned. And then you pass legislation called the Dangerous Dogs Act and you find it impossible to categorise what is a dangerous dog and the legislation becomes unworkable and becomes a kind of laughingstock for the government of trying to fall into the we must do something category.

11:16They do something and it doesn't work. And I suppose that the kind of reticence to legislate too quickly when you're not sure what the consequences would be isn't a stupid thing to do. Well, I would say the flip side of that is the seatbelt. You know, why are people telling me to wear a seatbelt? How can't I choose where I wear a seatbelt? Actually, the seatbelt works, right? The seatbelt saves lives. And now we all do it automatically. And you feel actually naked if you don't put a seatbelt on when you get in a car. Right. So some things are just much simpler than you think. Now, I know that, you know, if you speak to them.

11:48That was a philosophical argument, though. No one was saying that seatbelts didn't save lives. They were saying, philosophically, I should be able to choose. Just like in America, there are some states where you don't have to wear a crash helmet if you're riding a motorbike. Yes, but I suppose, you know, to your dangerous dogs thing, yes, it's sort of hard to grade. And I guess with the social media company, I mean, there's one, you know, strand of argument, which is, well, actually, it's for them to do this. You know, you sort yourselves out. You should be the ones that we're taking on, you know, whether it's Google, whether it's, you know, Twitter X, all the rest of it, Instagram.

12:20You should actually be providing a product which is safer than it currently is. I do think I was thinking about this a few months ago actually, I went to see Arcadia you know the Tom Stoppard play which is on in London and I came away from it and my brain really hurt and I just thought, I do think we are genuinely getting stupider and I think when people talk about a social media ban for the under 16s there's probably a part of us that are thinking I wish we could control it better in our own lives as well you talk to adults who say God, I don't know what's wrong with me at the moment. I can't concentrate on a book or I can't get through a novel or I find that, you know, my concentration isn't what it used to be or don't do as much with my free time, my hobbies.

13:04You know, the doom scrolling. A friend of mine has got a T-shirt that just says, bring me good news. And it's like, well, yes, you know, because everything that you're looking at is just this sort of imbibing of shit the whole time. And we're not actually, I mean, you know, Arcadia is an extraordinary story about sort of science and sort of parabolas. And, you know, I'm not doing a good explanation of it, but you come out of his sort of philosophical argument and you just think, I haven't thought that hard. I genuinely haven't sat down and thought that hard in the space of two hours for ages. And part of it is like we just it's it's shit.

13:42It's junk food. The stuff that we look at the whole time, whether it's, you know, the kind of adverts for foundation or the sort of, you know, funny memes or just endless. I mean, I love the animal ones, but I've got to stop them. Right. I mean, this this stuff is brain rotting for us, let alone the kids. TV producers who are making kind of series now, you know, an eight part series are putting reminders into the plot plot lines to remind you where we've got to, because they think that an awful lot of people are going to be watching the show while looking at their phone and scrolling on Instagram or whatever it happens.

14:16So they keep reminding people of what the plot is because they know people aren't paying attention to it. I think that's right. I think there is certainly it's true to say that the way that these companies monetize our attention is deeply troubling and it is problematic. And actually, the way I approach this, I think, is less about I think a ban is sort of a bit displacement activity, really. I think it makes us feel better. I don't think it's necessarily going to have much effect. I think what would be far more effective and more interesting would be to look at the power that these companies exercise, not just over children, but over everybody, particularly with regards to the attention economy.

14:53How these how the algorithms which dictate our attention work. And that's another reason, by the way, that some of the bland, the bands are a real, real blunt instrument, because the truth is, is that kids can still access, you know, YouTube is a great example in Australia. So this band means they can't have an account, but they can still watch as much YouTube as they want. and it just means that they just actually parents when they're looking at it can't see exactly what they've been watching so like these things are really blunt instruments i am far more concerned about i see you know these social media companies are so much like the kind of robber baron companies of the 1920s you know that this is when these the companies that the industrial age had sort of built up whether it was in some railroads or the great factories or whatever they happened to be they controlled huge sways of the american economy they were way too powerful they had built up natural monopolies.

15:38This is what these companies are like today. And you needed someone like a Teddy Roosevelt to come along with what the Americans call antitrust, that they come along and they break these companies up. They actually make the federal government, regulate them highly, see what they're doing. The truth is that so often with these companies, and we're seeing this play out with the AI revolution, there is such an asymmetry of knowledge between states and regulatory authorities and what these governments, what these companies are actually doing. And I think that our efforts would be far better invested in looking at those antitrust questions, whether these companies need to be broken up and thinking about how regulation needs to shift rather than just sort of talking about bans and so on, which I don't think is going to be very effective.

16:17If you start talking about a ban, not a ban, you know, an under 16, whatever, age, age, gate, do the companies themselves start to do better? Right. You want to be in a place where they go, OK, we're going to have to change what we sell or how we sell it. I mean, I was reading a really interesting piece in The Atlantic, actually, last week about a teacher who had got rid of tablets in the classroom. You know, like all kids now learn on tablets and they have the little electric, you know, the thingy, the stylus pens and they have the tablets. And he was like, right, I was at the forefront of this.

16:50You know, I'm not a technophobe. I brought the tablets into the classroom 10 years ago. I thought it was fantastic, revolutionary. We could do so much more. And he suddenly just turned around and gone, end of the tablet. because, A, we spent 20 minutes of the lesson correcting all the technical hitches or the charging problems or whatever. And the other thing was that he just said we got back to eye contact, right? I could suddenly see which of the kids was understanding what I was saying when I was standing at the front of the classroom. I mean, it's almost the blackboard, right? He's almost gone back to the blackboard.

17:21And I just think it has to probably come from consumers, right, that social media companies have got no incentive. What's that, you know, that quote, you know, it's very hard to persuade a man to give up what he's doing when, you know, his livelihood depends upon him carrying on doing it, right? There's very little incentive for social media companies to alter what they're doing because it's turning up such huge sums of money. So it has to be something that is consumer driven where we kind of go, do you know what? I'm not sure, no, or the kids don't. Because I think that's what will make them change.

18:00Right. So Bergman in the interview yesterday, and it's worth listening back to, makes the really compelling argument. He said what the social media, the social media companies are doing a great deal about all of this at the moment. They're doing a great deal to make it look like they're doing something when actually they're doing sweet FA. The conversation we had with Nick Clegg about a year ago. Yeah, they're not doing that much about it. I mean, I agree with you, Lewis, about the whole algorithm thing. That seems so much a bigger issue than the antitrust elements of all of that. That, you know, and that's kind of how limited what a UK government can do in that respect.

18:37I mean, Biden, for example, to illustrate the thing about antitrust, there is no way that the Biden administration, I remember thinking this time, I think saying when we were talking about the show, there's no way Biden, the Biden administration should have allowed Elon Musk to buy X. to have one individual controlling basically the primary news aggregator anywhere in the world, at least when it was a public company, there was an element of control by the shareholders. That's crazy. And Biden should never have allowed it to happen. Yes. But you could also argue that, you know, Instagram being owned by Facebook.

19:04Yeah, I agree. And WhatsApp. You know, it's all very well for us to say, oh, isn't it terrible? I use WhatsApp the whole time. Of course, but that's why I don't think it's going to come from consumers. That's why I actually disagree. I mean, I don't think I think this has to basically come from governments. And to be honest, the slight problem with this is that the place it's going to come from is it's well. And if there is, it's the US federal government, right, where most of these companies are controlling right now. He should have his phone taken away from him. Quite frankly, I think we can all agree.

19:28I'm right. Exactly. I mean, you know, there is also I mean, there is so much to this. And again, I want to I mean, you know, I'm not completely against the idea of a ban. I'm just not convinced by it for the reasons I've set out. Also, I think that if the government, our government, if it can do things, there are things it needs to look at seriously, which go, frankly, way beyond sort of the age gap of 16. I mean, we talk all the time about the effect that social media has on young people. What about the effect social media has on older people and older voters? You know, if anything, you can make an argument to say that young people, because they have grown up with this stuff, they're often way more literate in terms of spotting fake news, spotting AI, spotting these stories which are wrong and incorrect.

20:05You know, that is not true of voters who are much older, who are often more convinced by stuff they see online and just take it in. And there's plenty of evidence to suggest how digital life has radicalised older voters in all sorts of jurisdictions around the world. Well, I don't know that it has to be older, older. I mean, you could say that anyone who goes down into their bunker and starts reading anti-vax stuff. I mean, you could be 30 and get taken down. I don't think it's about, you know, old people versus young people. No, but like I say, I do think anyone over the age limit can be an idiot.

20:35That's what we're saying. But I don't think it's about being an idiot. I think it's about the effect that this stuff is having on our brains. And so, for example, I mean, one way that I think, you know, that the government needs to start thinking really hard about this. It is crazy. Right. We have these constant arguments in this country about media regulation. And what we're talking about, basically, is television. We're talking about radio as if that is the digital life, which actually determines the news sort of ingest ingestation that most people in this country now have does not exist. It is ridiculous.

21:03Right. Right now that, you know, we've got these local elections, you know, in our old lives when we were at BBC or any, you know, LBC would be the same because it's regulated here under Ofcom. You know, if we went to any seat or any local authority, we would have to speak and make sure that, like, every single party and a whole list of candidates is regulated within its life, as if the fact that, you know, even no hopers, say the Greens or Lib Dems in a particular seat, as if the fact that that had gone out for five seconds and that five seconds hadn't gone out would swing the result. But online, there is absolutely no regulation virtually about political content beyond the kind of base level of the law which exists at all.

21:39Apply that to juries, right? I mean, do you remember that, you know, the sort of, are you suitable to be a juror? Was like, have you, you know, read too much of the story? Do you know this story? Can you turn off from this story? Nobody's going to turn off from social media now, right? Even if you didn't watch the news, even if you, you know, that was how they sort of used to elect the jury, whether you're too close to a story and you knew all the background. Everyone knows about it from social media now. OK, so let's go back to the kind of where we started, which is about the under 16s. The bit of it, I mean, I understand your scepticism about the banning of social media for under 16s.

22:14Why are mobile phones allowed in schools? I mean, that's the one that absolutely bewilders me when kids have got mobile phones in the classroom. Why? But this is where I think so much of the effort ought to go, right, is that we can push and try and regulate to ensure that there are smartphone options. Really, when we talk again, this is the other thing. Social media. OK, fine. But actually what we're really talking about is kids addiction to smartphones. And there is a world where you could have, and this has been trialled in some companies and so on. And some people have talked about it. You know, you do have kind of light versions of smartphones for younger people that don't have the full access, you know, the full sort of suite of stuff that keeps you addicted and keeps you looking at it all the time.

22:50Or you make it easier for parents to regulate the length of time that kids are on these things and so on. So I think there are smarter ways of looking at it. The only thing I'd say is as well, though, is that I do think sometimes there is a little bit of like a bit of doomsaying about kind of our addiction to social life and it's destroying our attention spans and it means that life is less rich. I mean, there was definitely an argument for that. But on the other hand, I mean, look at this industry that we're now in. People listen to like three hour podcasts, four hour contacts. The richness of the intellectual life that we can access online and the information which exists is so much more vast and extraordinary by comparison.

23:24Literally, we've got the whole of the world's information and knowledge and all of the beauty of that at our fingertips. That clearly has downsides and deleterious effects as well. I don't think it's about the Internet, though. It's not about online information. It's not, you know, we're not saying, I mean, are we? We're not saying ban kids from using Google. Go and search things up, go and read stuff, go and, you know, watch your podcast, watch your stuff. I think it's a very different thing, which is the kind of endorphin quality of the likes. People did say that about television. They've said it about every technological innovation which has come along.