Britain should follow Australia’s lead and ban young people from social media, according to a leading campaigner for the protection of childhood.
The Australian Parliament last week backed the world’s toughest measures to stop under-16s using social media – and tech companies could fines of nearly £26million if they do not enforce new rules.
Former Conservative MP Miriam Cates, a senior fellow at the Centre for Social Justice and GB News presenter, hopes Australia will blaze a trail for Britain to follow.
She wants children denied access to “dreadful” content which encourages suicide, self-harm and misogyny and exposes them to pornography – and she is concerned they can be “contacted by people they don’t know” and “bullied by people they do know”.
Ms Cates is also alarmed that algorithms encourage young people to spend hours staring at screens.
“They are not being outside, they are not making face to face contact, they are not reading, they are not studying they are not doing sport – all those things that children really need to grow into competent adults,” she said.
A further goal is encouraging smartphone manufacturers to produce phones which allow children to make calls, send texts, use digital train tickets and access maps – but not download apps.
“I think that’s the answer really but Government will have to incentivise that to make it happen,” she said.
Her call comes as Labour MP Josh MacAlister works to change the law so headteachers will have a legal requirement to make schools “mobile-free zones”. His draft law would raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 – making it harder for companies to use children’s data to “push addictive content”.
Children’s Commissioner for England Dame Rachel de Souza said: “Too many children are still routinely exposed to significant and damaging online harms including violence, pornography and other material that promotes harmful behaviour. We have heard too many stories of children causing harm to themselves, or others, on the back of material they have been exposed to online.”
Dame Rachel said she was “really impressed” by the action in Australia, adding that “we need to start here with holding the social media companies properly to account for their laissez faire approach to children’s safety”.
Sir Peter Wanless, the chief executive of the NSPCC children’s charity, did not favour a “blanket ban”, saying this would “penalise children for the failures of tech companies to make their sites properly safe for young users”.
A Government spokeswoman said there are “no current plans to implement a smartphone or social media ban for children,” adding: “We are focused on finding the best way of ensuring young people are kept safe while also benefiting from the latest technology. By next summer, the Online Safety Act will bring in protections for children to make sure their experiences online are appropriate for their age.
“We have recently set out new priorities on online safety, including ensuring safety is baked into platforms from the start, and launched a research project looking at the links between social media and children’s wellbeing. This will help build the evidence base to inform future action.”