Rishi Sunak is reported to be considering a proposal to force children under the age of 16 to ask their parents for permission to use social media.
Parents have to make many difficult decisions. At what age is is reasonable to allow one’s child to go to the local shop alone, or walk to school, or attend a party to which, apparently, all his or her friends are going, or get back at three in the morning, or accept a lift from an unknown 17-year-old, or go somewhere in the Mediterranean to celebrate the end of exams?
But to put parents in charge of the question of access to social media is ridiculous. Few parents have the faintest idea how social media for children work.
And children need to be on social media. That is how they communicate with their friends. To be shut out of social media is to be condemned to painful oddity and intolerable solitude.
A small proportion of children are bad at mastering new technology, and would find their embarrassment at their own incompetence intensified by their inability to get round a parental ban on social media.
But most children are, of course, much quicker and defter than their parents, and will with the greatest ease find, with the help of friends, some unofficial, and perhaps insalubrious, way round the ban. Providers of unofficial alternatives will thrive.
One can see why Sunak’s advisers, wracking their brains for ways to recover in the polls, wish to demonstrate that the Government is “on the side of parents”.
But being on the side of parents should not mean making a bogus declaration that they are henceforth “in charge” of whether or not their children go on social media.
It should mean ensuring, as far as possible, that the social media used by children are salubrious.
And that in turn means making the tech companies accept that they are publishers, not mere providers of superhighways down which vast quantities of information flow.
There is an analogy here with what we expect of a printing firm. It cannot disclaim responsibility for what it prints, protesting its unawareness that it was producing instructions on how to poison the water supply.
So too the tech companies. They have editorial responsibilities. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the rest have to be edited in order to avert, as far as possible, the publication of instructions on how to poison the water supply.
“But this is expensive, difficult and does not always work,” the tech giants object.
Yes, one replies, it is sometimes all those things, but you’ve actually been quite good at this in some respects – see for example PhotoDNA – and it is in any case an unavoidable obligation. The publishers of any book, newspaper or website have to do this, and so must you.
The publisher or editor of a letters page cannot say “I did not write this letter, so I am not responsible for the illegal sentiments it contains”.
No more can the publishers of social media evade responsibility by saying they did not write this child pornography, or this encouragement to commit suicide and advice on how to go about it.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has called for laws in the United States to require under-16s to seek permission from their parents before downloading smartphone apps.
One can see why it suits Meta to transfer responsibility to parents, but it should not be allowed to get away with this evasion. Nor should its promotion of encryption become a means of disclaiming responsibility.
In this country, we have passed the Online Safety Act, but have yet to see whether ministers’ predictions of how it will protect children from harm will be justified.
In the Data Bill, to be debated this week in Parliament, the BBC reports that the Government intends to restrict the power of coroners to demand evidence held by tech companies to cases where children have taken their own lives, in contravention of an earlier assurance by Michelle Donelan, then the Digital Secretary, that online evidence could be obtained in other cases where it might be relevant to a death.
Donelan contends that the changes the parents want are covered by existing law.
Hard cases make bad law. The wishes of bereaved families should not always be paramount. This is nevertheless an area studied much more carefully by bereaved families than by most of us, and in which their arguments deserve the most careful consideration, in order to avoid the repetition of avoidable tragedy.
We cannot allow the tech companies to pretend, in the name of freedom, that they are not responsible for upholding the rule of law on social media. The Wild West won’t do.
Sunak knows Silicon Valley well, and was recently proud to interview Elon Musk. The real service he can do for anxious parents, of whom he is also one, is to ensure that Big Tech is not too big to behave with civility, and to act within the law, when providing services for our children.