‘Technology is addling young people’s brains, impacting on their education and attainment, impacting on their health and wellbeing,’ Wes Streeting said on the Today programme this morning. It followed his remarks yesterday that ‘social media should be treated like tobacco – it’s extremely addictive, and bad for our health’. He was commenting on the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges’ (AOMRC’s) response to a consultation, launched by Sir Keir Starmer at the beginning of the year, on the impact of social media on teenagers.
Streeting’s comments echoed the AOMRC’s report, which quoted Professor Tracy Daszkiewicz of the Faculty of Public Health, saying social media has created a ‘structural conflict between profitability and child wellbeing, a pattern public health has confronted before in industries such as tobacco, alcohol and gambling’.
To draw a comparison between smoking and social media you must demonstrate that, like nicotine, social media is addictive and that, like nicotine, social media is demonstrably causing harm to users. One of the reasons that the government ordered a consultation is because the evidence is so thin.
It is often asserted that the impact of social media on teenagers’ mental health is a settled question, partly thanks to Jonathan Haidt’s popular psychology book The Anxious Generation. His research identified a correlation between rising social media use in the late 2000s and early 2010s and rising self-reported mental health issues among young people. But while these two trends coincided, the evidence proving that social media caused mental health problems is lacking, as psychology professor Christopher Ferguson explained recently in The Spectator.
More studies have been published in the months since the consultation was launched, including one finding that smartphone bans in schools make ‘minimal differences in quality of life or mental well-being of pupils’. Another, from last year, found no link between social media and poor mental health. So perhaps less of a demonstrable link than lung cancer death risk being 15 times higher in men who smoke compared to men who have never smoked.
The submission by the AOMRC is nevertheless confident that social media causes harm. It opens with the claim that there is an ‘overwhelming consensus that excessive screen time can harm children and young people’, and says ‘we need to call this out unflinchingly rather than passively wait for someone else to prove causation’. Anyone who argues about correlation against causation is making a similar argument to those ‘in the sixties and seventies with smoking and seatbelts’, the report says.
But it also accepts, however stubbornly, that there is still no real evidence that social media is causing harm to children, saying that there is ‘remarkably little concrete data about the scale of the problem in the UK today’. That does not stop the authors from confidently asserting, with the help of some clinical testimony, that social media is a public health crisis on a scale with deaths by vehicle accidents and smoking. In 1982, the year before Britain’s seat belt law was enforced, 2,443 people were killed on the roads, a number which dropped to 816 by 2016. Exactly how the success of an under-16s social media ban will be measured 30 years from now – given that nobody is being run over by their smartphone – is anyone’s guess.
Perhaps the most worrying thing about Wes Streeting’s remarks is that he said ‘a ban for under 16s must be the start, not the end’. He has not elaborated on what he wants to happen next – but here is a prediction: the arguments which are applied to banning social media for under 16s, be it radicalisation or ‘mental health’, can also be applied to adults.
Why not raise restrictions to age 25, when the brain finishes developing?
What you have to keep in mind about social media bans is the political dynamic. Keir Starmer blamed the Southport rioting partly on division which he said was ‘clearly whipped up online’. The AOMRC report also specifically mentions ‘radicalisation’. Miriam Cates, a former politician who has also prominently made the case for social media restrictions for under 16s, has written before that absolute free speech online is ‘incompatible with functional human relationships and therefore antithetical to a safe and functional society’, said that conservatives should not be ‘defending the indefensible’, and questioned the right to online anonymity.
The Online Safety Act, which was ostensibly introduced to protect children from online harms, has already harmed free speech. Thanks to the act, Zia Yusuf of Reform UK had one of his TikToks deleted on the grounds that it made controversial remarks about immigration. Rod Dreher, a prominent conservative writer, has had his work criticising immigration policies censored in the UK because of the act.
How long before such politicians and academics start saying that the under-21s must also be kept safe from online harms? Why not raise restrictions to age 25, when the brain finishes developing? We will only have ourselves to blame if we let the thin end of the wedge be hammered in with such light evidence.
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