“We must do more to protect children”, said the Prime Minister, responding to yesterday’s (March 25) decision by a Los Angeles jury, which found the tech giants Meta and Google responsible for damaging the mental health of a 20-year-old. The plaintiff, known only by her first name, Kaley, was awarded $6 million in damages ($3 million in punitive damages and $3 million in additional damages). Jurors agreed that Meta – which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp – and Google, the owner of YouTube, had deliberately built and designed their social media platforms to be addictive.
Campaigners to ban social media for under-16s have welcomed the case, arguing it has confirmed their worst fears. Social media is harmful to children and they should be protected from it. Jonathan Haidtthe highly respected social psychologist whose book The Anxiety Generation has been so influential in this debate, responded to the court’s decision, saying, “Social media is a flawed, dangerous product, and states have the right to act to protect their children from dangerous products.”
Maybe. I am not an expert in US law. But if states have a responsibility to protect children from dangerous products, surely parents do too. And this case has some troubling features that should prompt discussion about where responsibility lies when it comes to children and social media. Kaley told the court that she started using YouTube when she was six years old. She downloaded the app to her iPod Touch to “watch videos about lip gloss and an online game for kids.” COMMUNICATIONS has reported. Kaley joined Instagram three years later, when she was nine years old. By 10, the court heard, Kaley began experiencing anxiety and depression, for which she later received therapy.
I do not doubt the difficulties this young woman has gone through. How could I? I have the greatest sympathy. But as a mother of two, I find some of these details difficult to understand. Why was no one aware that these platforms were being accessed at such a young age? How can this be? My nine year old doesn’t have a device to put Instagram on. We have no intention of changing that anytime soon. But if he did, I’m pretty sure I’d know what he was doing and put the necessary parental controls in place. At one point during her testimony, Kaley told the court, “I stopped engaging with the family because I was spending all my time on social media.” It is unclear from media reports how old she was at this point. But I can’t help but wonder why no one intervened. Put away your phone, iPod Touch, tablet – whatever it is –.
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I’m not an apologist for Meta or Google (nor Snap and TikTok, which settled with Kaley before the case went to court). These companies can and should undoubtedly do more to keep kids safe online, either through much stronger age verification systems or by disabling certain features. The Los Angeles court found the companies “negligent.” Features such as “endless” scrolling and autoplay were designed to “hook” young children, the jury agreed, and did not adequately warn them of the dangers. Just the other day, a New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $375 million. It was found serious BLAME with the tech giant over the safety of its platforms, saying it exposed children to sexually explicit material. This is both disgusting and deeply disturbing to me as a parent.
But much of the discussion about the harm of social media seems to focus on the software—the apps and the content within them—rather than the hardware needed to view them: smartphones, tablets, iPod Touches (now pretty old school). Here, too, parents have some responsibility. The picture is more complicated, more nuanced, than some activists present.
In January, more than 60 Labor MPs sign an open letter calling for a ban on social media for under 16s. This is what many believe led to the government’s decision to launch a consultation on the issue. The man behind the letter, Plymouth Moor View MP Fred Thomas, presented his case to Telegraph a month ago. “The average 12-year-old spends 29 hours each week on their smartphone,” he wrote. “In the last three years, the likelihood of young people having mental health problems has increased by one breathtaking 50 percent,” he claimed, and “teachers and students tell me all the time about the pressures of the online world.”
However, it is clear that there is much more going on in these statements than would be resolved by simply passing a ban. Leaving aside whether the first statistic is true, what about not giving 12-year-olds a smartphone or putting restrictions on it? The “online world” is not limited to social media, something the government’s adviser on suicide prevention and mental health, Professor Louis Appleby, has stressed. With more than a quarter century of suicide and mental health research behind him, Appleby is worth a listen. “There is an undeniable risk of suicide from social media,” he said write on social media, “but it’s only part of a broader Internet risk that includes the information available there.” Does this matter? he asked. “That is, if a ban on social media distracts from addressing the full problem.”
Lawyers and activists have heralded yesterday’s ruling in the US as a major turning point in the battle against social media. There are now hundreds of similar cases in US courts. There is widespread agreement that social media can be harmful to children. The debate is how best to handle it.
Two studies are planned for the UK to see which approach might work best. one, involving 300 teenagerswill compare four different groups. A quarter of participants will not have access to the most popular social media apps (mimicking a ban). Another quarter will have no restrictions on them, modeling the current deal. But two other groups will also be studied: one that limits social media use to 60 minutes a day and one where young people will not be able to access social media between 9pm and 7am. one second, larger study is being developed with 4,000 12-15 year olds in Bradford, which has a similar design. Results will not be available until 2027.
Whether Kaley’s case, or any other individual’s, proves that banning social media is the only way out, I’m still not convinced. I think the UK government is right to take its time to study the LA decision “very carefully”, but not to move towards action. Things will change, the Prime Minister said today. “The question is how much and what are we going to do?” Consultations cannot go on forever. Decisions must be made. But we should welcome a commitment to look at the evidence and competing solutions to this most damaging problem. For some policies, however well-intentioned, they can have unintended consequences.
(Further reading: Of course the police could find Morgan McSweeney’s phone)
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