Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser
If you want an example of the desperate state of policymaking that has left Britain and the West in its current plight, you might start with the child social media ban.
The arguments for doing it seem to amount to ‘Children are harmed by social media,’ ‘A ban would be really popular,’ and ‘Lots of Labour backbenchers want it.’ All of these things are true – though something that lots of Labour backbenchers want is, almost by definition, a mistake.
Much less prominent in the debate, however, is this even more important question. Would it work?
Early evidence from Australia, where a ban began in December, says no. According to the Australian government’s e-safety commissioner, 69.4 per cent of underage children have still got their accounts on Snapchat, 69.3 per cent have still got their accounts on TikTok, 69.1 per cent have still got their accounts on Instagram and 63.6 per cent have still got their accounts on Facebook.
You may say that 30 per cent of children losing their accounts is better than nothing; it’s a start. But it might actually be worse than nothing, because (in the belief that children are excluded) the platforms will be under less pressure, in the long-term, to ensure that content harmful to children is not published.
Indeed, that is one argument made by the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, who is in favour of a social media ban for children. It will, she says, mean we “no longer need to contort digital spaces to be universally ‘child-friendly,’ or impose blanket restrictions on speech and content because children might see it. If we stop treating children like adults, we can stop treating adults like children too.”
In practice, then, slightly fewer children may be using these services, but greater harm may be caused to the majority who still do use them. And it’s likely always to be possible for kids to get round whatever age-limiting technology is put in place.
Let’s say I’m wrong. That some really tough enforcement mechanism is out there and the British government is ultra-effective at ensuring it’s used. Yes, the latter would be a once-in-a-century first, but indulge me. The problem then shifts to the open-sesame of your 16th birthday, when you’re suddenly drowned in a flood of the content that you’ve been protected from and haven’t been able to learn how to handle. Sixteen is still pretty young. Maybe the answer to that one will be an under-18 ban, or an under-35 ban, or a ban on anyone who hasn’t proved their intellectual capacity with a subscription to the Financial Times.
Everyone is harmed by social media, not just children. Even if you never use it, or if you aren’t directly harmed by using it, or its direct harm to you is outweighed by its direct benefit to you, it is clearly reshaping societies in ways which both help and harm us all. That is the greatest argument against a child ban: that it is a simplistic distraction from the much bigger and more complicated task of minimising the harms that social media does to society and maximising its benefits, all while maintaining democratic principles of freedom of online expression and assembly.
That job is complicated because it involves tradeoffs between freedom and safety, and technical things that most politicians and commentators don’t understand. It means getting under the bonnet of social media’s most pernicious design features – the monetisation of division and anger, and the algorithms that serve you up ever more extreme content. It means forcing the social media companies to expose their internal wiring so it can be understood and, if necessary, changed.
Just as we have the criminal law, and a police force to protect us from criminals, we need to decide as a nation what we want and do not want from social media, then set up an expert enforcement body – an algorithm patrol – and specialist court to see that we get it.
Britain generally, I know, needs reduced, not increased, regulation, which is another reason I’m against blanket bans. But this should be seen in the same light as the state intervening to protect the free market from monopoly capitalism, from the US trust-busting of the early twentieth century onwards.
It is also, by the way, a fascinating case study in the two sides of Kemi Badenoch. She was so very good last week on the Nowak horror: a voice of strength, nuance and sanity amid all the denial on the left and crass rage-baiting on the further right. But on this subject she was an early advocate of the stupid, simplistic child ban and has deployed some fairly unsound arguments.
Let’s hope the first Kemi wins out over the second one.