What is the point of an overnight social media curfew for 16- and 17-year-olds? The government’s plan to compel tech companies such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to switch off between midnight and 6am comes with one important proviso: a couple of clicks in account settings, and older teenagers will be able to override the digital bedtime. Simple! So why bother?
Clearly, social media is an easy political target right now. Amid a hysterical, anecdote-rich but evidence-light debate, smartphones and algorithms are blamed for everything from teen mental health problems to childhood obesity, from falling birth rates to the decline in reading. For beleaguered government ministers and a soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister in search of a legacy, bashing tech companies is an easy win. When last month’s announcement that under-16s will be banned entirely from a range of social media platforms was met only with calls to go further and faster, it is hardly surprising that plans are in place to do just that.
Nor will this be the end of it. This week’s curfew notification comes with the promise of more restrictions in the pipeline. So-called ‘addictive’ features like auto-play and infinite scroll are to be next for the chop. The only response from opposition MPs is ‘more, more, more’ – more is what we can expect.
But there are good reasons to oppose a social media curfew for 16- and 17-year-olds – even if it is a futile exercise, more geared towards making government ministers seem virtuous than actually curtailing midnight scrolling.
The aim of a curfew that can be overridden is to provide a ‘nudge’ to older teenagers, prompting them to put their phones down and go to sleep. ‘Nudging’ has been a feature of our political landscape since David Cameron established his ‘Behavioural Insights Team’ in 2010 to change people’s actions through psychological prompts. It is now everywhere. We are nudged by road signs telling us that ‘most people take their litter home’, by graphic images of terminally ill patients on cigarette packs, and by calorie counts on restaurant menus. The nudgers might mean well, but their attempts at manipulation raise important questions about free will and human agency. Lying awake scrolling all night is probably not a good idea. But don’t older teenagers have the right to work this out for themselves?
The very idea of social media curfews for 17-year-olds is infantilising. We worry about the growing number of young adults not in education, employment or training, and ask why people continue to live with their parents into their 30s, marrying and starting families much older than previous generations. But go back just a few decades and it was not unusual to see 16-year-olds taking on adult responsibilities, perhaps at home or in the workplace. The summer I turned 17, I worked in a restaurant that stayed open long after the local nightclubs emptied out at 2am. I would have been outraged by the suggestion that I needed a tech company to nudge me into going to sleep after a long shift.
That a screen-time curfew can be suggested speaks to levels of government overreach that should concern even the most committed technophobes. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has said the measures will be ‘crucial in helping young people get the sleep they need, focus on school and college, and spend more quality time with family and friends’. Sounds delightful. So I hate to be the one to break it to Liz, but teenagers were yawning, uncommunicative, argumentative, lazy and belligerent long before smartphones were ever invented. It’s not for government ministers to define or nudge us into ‘quality time’, it’s for parents and children themselves to determine the shape of family life.
Let’s not forget: the same government ministers who think older teenagers need nudging to go to sleep also want to give 16-year-olds the vote. There is no better illustration of our collective confusion as to where the boundary between childhood and adulthood lies today. Aged-16, youngsters will be permitted to decide on the future of the country, but not to set their own bedtime. Twelve-year-olds questioning their gender identity can consent to help test the efficacy of puberty blockers in a medical trial, but not to have a TikTok account. Make it make sense.
It is tempting to just poke fun at a social media curfew that teenagers can easily override. But the threat this government poses to individual agency, parental authority and the meaning of adulthood is deadly serious.
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