Nearly 20 years ago, encouraged by the Labour peer Lord Adonis, I joined the revolution to create academy schools in Britain. Ten years later, encouraged this time by the editor of this magazine, I became a minister responsible for academies and free schools.
What hope do we have of turning this country round if we have an entire generation warped by social media?
I did this because I believe that academies – based on the principle that parents know what is best for their children and the state should get out of their way – transform lives.
So why do I now find myself leading the charge in the House of Lords for the state to intervene and raise the age limit for social media to 16? The reason is that the threat to our children – and to our society as a whole – is now so severe that the state has no choice but to step in.
Before discussing a ban, it is worth keeping in mind what our children are being exposed to on their social media feeds every day. One study found that 70 per cent of children had seen real-life violent content online, with only 6 per cent seeking it out.
Algorithms which are designed to reward attention constantly push videos of stabbings and beatings into young people’s feeds. What kind of effect is this content having on them?
When you speak to police officers, battling hard to keep the public safe, it is clear that there is a clear link between social media use and criminality for young people. Drugs are glamourised, leading to early experimentation. Gangs use social media to recruit children as young as seven and control their movements. Social media sites are the backbone of the county lines networks which force children to sell drugs.
They are also having a radicalising effect. That’s why the heads of MI5, Counter Terror Policing and the National Crime Agency took the unprecedented step of issuing a joint warning about online safety to parents last summer, and likely why young people are being arrested for terrorism offences among the highest on record. We picture radicalisation happening in backstreet corners of formerly industrial towns. We imagine shadowy but charismatic figures recruiting vulnerable young men in person. No longer – young people are being groomed in their bedrooms, on their phones and tablets, while their parents sit downstairs completely unaware.
And then there is the exploitation we do not talk enough about. Predators don’t just lurk in the shadows; they operate openly on platforms grooming vulnerable children in plain sight, with ‘com groups’ blackmailing teenagers into sharing explicit images or harming themselves.
On mental health, the statistics could not be clearer. There has been a 15-fold rise in eating disorders amongst 17 to 19-year-olds in recent years.
Beyond the human tragedy, this terrifies me economically. What hope do we have of turning this country round if we have an entire generation warped by social media? A generation too anxious to form relationships – too unwell to work or too distracted to achieve. Our public services are already buckling because they are fighting a mental health epidemic – all while social media inflames the crisis.
And yet I hear the understandable lament of The Spectator reader: this is just basic parenting – parents should just refuse to let their children use social media. But that effectively means making your child a social pariah when everyone else in their class is already online. There is a reason 86 per cent of parents want this ban. They’re not asking the state to replace them, they’re asking for intervention to break the network effects of social media.
Others worry that a social media ban for under-16s will be used by governments to stifle free speech. But this is nonsense. We don’t let a 12-year-old get behind the wheel of a car and drive up the M1, or let a ten-year-old buy a couple of pints at their local. The state, for very good reason, bars children from doing certain things while their brains develop and they acquire the knowledge and experience to navigate them wisely.
Conservatives believe in law and order, in strong families, and in a state that knows when to act and when to get out of the way. We trusted parents with academies, and we were right to do so. We should trust them now when they are crying out for a line in the sand. This is the moment to act, not out of moral panic, but to give children their childhood back.
Lord Nash has an amendment down to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill which would raise the age limit for social media to 16.
