Contribution
To be fair to the Minister and previous Ministers, I think they do make efforts to hear from young people. An interesting survey by the Youth Endowment Fund, which I commend to the hon. Lady and others, put an extreme proposition to 13 to 17-year-olds: “If you could turn off social media forever for you and everybody else, would you do it?” While a majority did not say yes to that extreme proposition, something like a third did. We also have various other surveys.
It is true that when we talk to children, as I am sure many colleagues have done in schools across their constituencies, we get a variety of views. In particular, children do not want to be left out, and as parents we do not want that for our children either. If everybody else is in a certain group or has a certain means of communication, we tend to want our children to have that too.
The evidence is not perfect. There is even evidence that some screen time is a positive good. A programme for international student assessment study in 2019 talked about a Goldilocks effect, where about an hour of screen time was beneficial for mental wellbeing, after which the benefit declined. That same study found wide differences in life satisfaction between what it called “extreme internet users” and others. There are now plenty of other studies on everything from happiness, the quality of relationships and eyesight to the effect on sleep and concentration.
There is also the rising incidence of mental ill health among teenagers, which—for the avoidance of doubt and to take politics out of it—is not unique to this country and not uniquely a post-covid effect. Causality is still hard to prove, but it seems extraordinary that, when we are talking about children, we allow something to happen because we cannot prove 100% that it causes harm, rather than allowing it to happen only if we can prove that it is safe. That is not the way we deal, for example, with children’s food or toys. I would turn the question around: are people really suggesting that the prevalence of self-harm is nothing to do with the prevalence and normalisation of certain imagery on social media?
The Online Safety Act was a landmark piece of legislation, and we will debate it again in Westminster Hall on Wednesday. Everybody who worked on it— including myself—was always clear that it would not be the last time we had to come back to this subject in legislation. It is inevitable that there will be further regulation and restrictions in the interests of greater child protection. I therefore urge the Government to move from working out whether there will be further protections to working out what those will be. Of course, to write legislation—to return to where I started—one needs to be able to define things precisely and, in reality, there is no bright line between a smartphone and a brick phone, and no slam-dunk definition of social media either.
It can be instructive to think about individual platforms and services. One of the things we worry about is TikTok. Do we worry about Snapchat? Yes, we probably do, because of the association with bullying and the disappearing messages. But some families like the snap friends function, because they can see where different family members are. Do we worry about Instagram? Yes, we probably do, and it has a particular association with issues around body image. But it is also a way for people to share lovely family photos, and for extended families to keep in touch.
A lot of families allow children to have WhatsApp, when they would not allow them to have TikTok, and up until quite recently, some would not even have called it a social media platform. Where we think we have problems with disinformation on TikTok and Facebook, other countries have them with WhatsApp. What about YouTube? For many people, YouTube is not social media; it is a place where they go to watch videos or for music. But because it has user-generated content, it is also social media; it is certainly capable of sucking up a lot of young people’s time, and it has potential rabbit holes that people can fall down.
What about gaming? Gaming is different from social media, but modern gaming also has quite a lot of social media-like functions, such as lists of friends. Certainly, it is a way of trying to create communities of people with common interests. It is also often linked to the use of Discord or to streaming on Twitch. And, again, it certainly takes up a lot of time—unless, of course, someone is in China, where the Government will allow them to do it for only one hour a day, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
All of the above have risks attached, and they all have negatives, but we are unlikely to say that we want to ban them all—far from it. There is also a different risk: if we take one thing and ban it based on its specific features—its specific definition—we just push people to other places. Other things will then get more social-media characteristics, and children may end up in darker places on the internet. All of that is probably why the Australians ended up where they did: saying that it is probably more about specific functionality and that, at the end, it might be about having to make case-by-case judgments.
We worry about content; unwanted, inappropriate contact, as others have said; the excessive time children spend on platforms; potential addiction; the effects on sleep and concentration; and myopia. Crucially—my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) covered this very well—these technologies can also crowd out other things. Whether they, in and of themselves, are good or bad, there are only 24 hours in a day, and we want children, in the time they are not at school and not asleep, to be able to access the full range of things that childhood should be all about.