We don’t let our children dabble in drugs. Why do we let them dabble in social media?

As further details of the tragic suicide of Molly Russell emerge, is it time to consider a ban on social media for children?

In 1954 a seminal paper in the British medical journal detailed for the first time a causal link between smoking and lung cancer.  In so doing the paper paved the way not only for significant restrictions on the sale and marketing of tobacco, but for a paradigm shift in society’s attitudes towards smoking.

Last week, the Molly Russell case was the first time social media has been found to have directly contributed to a child’s death.  It should lead to a similar watershed moment for social media use and children.

Until now, debate around social media harms has centred around the provisions of the Online Safety Bill and broadly congregates into two camps: Camp One, the child safety advocates who attest to an urgent imperative to prioritise child safety online; and Camp Two, the free speech advocates who are viscerally uneasy with the implications of the Bill for free speech, most especially its “legal but harmful” provisions.

The two camps are often pitted against each other, but in truth both positions should be unarguable.  Without urgent action a generation of children will be exposed to further harm from social media; failure to protect free speech will lead to an escalation of the kind of arbitrary, opaque and sinister cancellation and deplatforming to which UsForThem and others recently fell victim.  In the long run, a failure to ensure corruption of the public square could be just as disastrous for child welfare as the direct threat posed by social media.

Children must be protected.  Free speech must be protected.   

It is almost impossible to say which is more important, but neither should we have to.  The Online Safety Bill is currently the only legislative tool in town for protecting children’s safety online.  In the wake of the Molly Russell findings, it would be virtually criminal were the Bill to be sacrificed in its entirety on the altar of free speech.   However, if the ‘legal but harmful’ provisions regulating adult content need to be amended or ditched to secure the protection of free speech and the passage of the Bill through Parliament, that is what must now happen.

However, in the detail of the controversy surrounding free speech an equally critical point risks being missed.  This is whether the Bill will be the panacea for child safeguarding online that many hope.

The Bill includes a new, wide duty of care on social media companies to remove harmful content and to prevent children from “encountering altogether” certain types of content, to be policed by beefed-up enforcement and sanction powers granted to Ofcom.  However not only are the provisions notoriously complex - and complicated law makes for law that is neither easily follow-able, nor enforceable - but they assume that Ofcom, a traditionally kitten-toothed regulator, will overnight morph into a lion; as one regulatory lawyer I spoke to remarked, to date, “Ofcom is perhaps more of an old school regulator from an era where government felt that big business needed occasional nudging to do the right thing rather than a full beating up on.”  

Under the Bill, social media companies will be required to “use proportionate” measures to mitigate and manage risks which is a far cry away from the kind of absolute, strict liability offence that one might expect for an activity with the potential to gravely harm children en masse.  It risks giving too much wiggle room to the tech companies who have already proved guilty of, in the words of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Michelle Donelan, a “horrific failure to … put the welfare of children first”.  Plus, the timeframes are problematic: children have already waited half a decade since the Bill began life as a Green Paper in 2017 and even with a fair wind it’s likely to be another 2/3 years, at the earliest, until the Bill takes effect.

More existentially, the Bill is predicated on the notion that whilst certain content and its algorithmic mode of addictive delivery is problematic, social media per se - at least for over 12s - is not.  But are we really sure that it isn’t social media itself that’s the problem?

Not only does social media take children away from real life - a “false world”, said Coroner Andrew Walker in the Molly Russell case, “full of illusion and lacking in any kind of reality”, but it’s entire business model rests on developing addictive habits in the user to better monetise the attention of the user. It encourages or facilitates behaviours which even without pernicious algorithms seem detrimental to children - the sharing of snapshots of the unattainable perfect body on Pinterest and Instagram, say, or the enabling of a vicious new breed of online bullying on WhatsApp and Snapchat.   The pathway into social media use is getting ever younger - one survey of over 2000 children found that 53% of children owned a phone by age seven.  “Introducing my children to social media was the worst thing I’ve done”, says one parent; “I've struggled hugely to find a way to regulate my kid's poisonous online usage short of confiscating the mobile”, says another.  

As we came to realise with tobacco, there are circumstances in which the duty to protect our vulnerable override the desire for freedom to chose.  Isn’t it now time to consider more prescriptive measures for regulating access to social media, including an outright ban for the under 16s?  

Arguments against an outright ban include that it should be for parents to control the social media use of their children (though when peers are all on social media this places parents in an invidious position); that it should be possible for Big Tech to make their platforms less harmful by way of clever design choices - e.g. age verification and tweaking algorithms (the reality to date suggests this may not be easy though it is the approach essentially favoured by the Online Safety Bill); and that social media may have valid uses - one parent points to the sharing of recipes on TikTok, one teenager points to the value derived from sharing blog content.  This is undoubtedly true, though the question then becomes whether these benefits override the significant harms or perhaps whether there is a half-way solution - for example automatic and compulsory parental access as a mandatory feature on all under 16's accounts.

Neither is it only particularly vulnerable children who are at risk of falling prey to the dangers of social media.  Molly was described as being happy and settled before falling into depression induced, at least in part, by her social media use.  Ask any parent how many children they know in their family friendship circles who’ve had issues with social media and addictive apps and you realise that what happened to Molly could happen to any child.

The Molly Russell case reveals in painstaking detail the impossibility of protecting children in the new frontier of harm which is the social media world.  “You wouldn’t send a child out on the edge of a busy road without holding their arm”, observed Coroner Andrew Walker, yet this is exactly what we often do every time we let our children use social media.

This tragic loss of a young life must now be the catalyst for a soul-searching exercise about social media and the extent to which it should feature in our children’s lives.