So, the government has decided to ban children under 16 from social media. Responsible? Desperate? Following orders? Or just playing to the gallery?
In the flurry of desperate announcements over the last few weeks as stalking horse Burnham creeps up on Sir Rodney Trilateral Woodentop, the PM is thrashing around to seem relevant as his time in the parliamentary carnival draws to a close. Policies that never made even a suggestion in any manifesto are yeeted out into law without discussion or even common sense – mostly the concepts of the various think tanks advising all sides in the plutocracy we call government.
Over the period of Labour’s office since the public decided they needed new tie colours in Westmonster, the Labour Party, who ran on a manifesto of “We aren’t the Tories and we’ve flushed the lefties,” suddenly found out they had absolutely no idea how to run a country, having for the last five years existed united in one goal – to rid the party of anyone remotely from or leaning toward socialism or social justice.
In office, individually funded by oligarchs, water companies, Zionists and private heath companies, and without any vision or inclination to serve, they have allowed themselves to be led by corporations, equity finance (Blackrock even get to sit in on cabinet meetings) and the Nerd Reich, to the extent that policy announcements read like proclamations of corporate allegiance or industry advertisements.
Only last week for instance, Sir Rodney announced that children who were from poor backgrounds, i.e. those who needed a breakfast club, would be given an AI ‘tutor’ to improve their education and give them a boost. Thus, he announced that AI tutors will be rolled out to 450,000 children on free school meals to close the attainment gap. Speaking at London Tech Week, the PM also announced the government’s new AI job-seeking tool.
The fact that not-poor kids will get an actual teacher instead of an AI programme/app seemed to go over the heads of most of the press who reported on it. The fact that spending on education is so abhorrent to successive governments is deemed unworthy of investigation.
Leading children’s protection charity opposes the blanket ban
Then, this week, we come to an announcement of a complete social media ban on 16s and unders. They will be blocked from accessing platforms, including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and X, from next spring. No discussion proffered, no evidence prepared or offered, but the usual media blitz by ministers and government supporters giving us their ‘opinions’ instead of any scientific or data-driven facts. The leading children’s protection charity in the UK, the NSPCC, opposes a blanket ban on social media, along with many other children’s safety groups.
They said: “But for countless children, especially those who feel shut out or unheard offline, social media isn’t a luxury. It’s a lifeline – a source of community, identity, and vital support. A blanket ban would take those spaces away overnight and risks driving teenagers into darker, unregulated corners of the internet.
“Everyone involved in this debate will have the best interests of children at heart, but children’s fundamental right to participate safely in the digital world, to access information, to connect with peers and to have their voices heard must be protected. They should not be stripped of those rights because tech companies have repeatedly failed to build platforms that protect them.”
We have, Joan (my wife) and I, as grandparents, a lot of experience of this. We cut down heavily on phone or iPad use when we have them stay with us and encourage other activities, including time in the studio as well as gardening and writing/reading. We have grave misgivings regarding many social media platforms, but not just with kids. We find adults can barely concentrate on more than a paragraph now, so familiar with quick bursts of performance for clicks and endless streaming garbage, as well as the fact the algorithms are an ongoing programming psyop and subliminal messaging. Hence the rising racism and animosity towards migrants and refugees and obviously the rise of Deform, Restore and fascism in general.
However, our views as grandparents on social media and children is opinion, anecdotal, not researched fact. I already have an app on my phone that allows me to see and veto any new programme or app the grandkids put on their devices, but even they find ways to get around this. In Australia, where this has already been tested, they soon found that children and young adults were quick to find ways around the sanctions, scrolling through the apps without creating an account for instance, using VPNs alongside other methods. They are tech savvy. A sanction is a challenge.
Our opinion, personal, is that social media and access to mobile phones should be limited, as should access to AI engines and whatever next they breed, but we have to understand why others feel different. A single mum with two jobs cannot give the levels of attention needed, so is at least at times grateful that the kids are quiet on the iPad or phone, just as you can go into some homes and the TV is on all the damn time. We have children living in a society so atomised, sometimes the only way to speak to a friend or at least someone, is to speak to someone else online, even if they are an imaginary friend, or worse.
Unintended consequences
Take a sledgehammer to a problem heavy-handed and the law of unintended consequences risks driving children elsewhere else online. The dumbing down of content to 30-second bites, or even less in some cases, and the growing influence of AI, is no doubt having a marked effect on young (and old) brains. But these actions are not carried out with the backing of rigorous research or logic, they are a knee jerk reaction to political weather, in this case the party being in hock to the Nerd Reich, the lack of vision and ideas and the impending arrival of Burnham to rock the boat (who, btw, will have the same neoliberal tendencies but with a better bedside manner and with a Manc accent). No saviour he.
There is undoubtably a measure of damage done by addiction to social media and it’s fairly obvious that young brains can be distracted, that content can be unwholesome and sometimes downright dangerous, that there is bullying and othering online, but, instead of coming down hard on the media companies for poor or dangerous content (who decides?), they get a free pass and the user base is targeted instead. Elon Musk in particular, with his ownership of X, flaunts his ultra-right tendencies verging on fascism in his alteration of the algorithm and his overt posts on his own account, encouraging Farage and ‘Tommeh’ in their othering of migrants and supporting ‘patriots’ to take a stand for a white supremacist UK – yet no sanctions have been taken against the platform. Why?
If the plutocracy and oligarch monopoly-controlled political herd had an inclination toward any amount of reasonable care or concern for the children of the UK, or for that matter the citizens of the UK, they would be ramping up spending on education, on specialist teachers, on après-school activities, youth clubs, outdoor practices, the arts, gardening and further education and training.
Instead, the money is going on data centres that no one asked for, the military industrial complex in the build up to war and the scraps are left to everything else (let’s leave aside for now the fact of how the state creates money). These are deliberate policy choices that have been made and cemented into the narrative by successive neoliberal governments in hock to their owners.
The whole issue of digital ID and how governments use and control it is about to get much worse and very much more complex. Add to the mix AI and oligarch-controlled algorithms on the media platforms they own and we have the potential for more authoritarian structures and the whittling away of not only freedom of speech, already under attack, but freedom of agency as well.
Implementing these measures without evidence, data and debate is simply not acceptable. The ban on social media for children is reactionary and populist, badly thought out and doomed to fail. It needs further discussion and consultations, published research and a better understanding of the effect it has, along with AI, on human consciousness, thought processes and morals, to be better understood. An authoritarian ban simply fails on all counts.
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