Talkin' bout a revolution

New grass roots campaigns to protect kids from smartphones and social media are growing explosively

Yesterday’s Times Leader was an interesting straw in the wind. It argues:

Efforts are being made to ban the use of smartphones by pupils during school hours but what about something more radical — the banning of smartphones for all children under 16? Almost everyone has a smartphone by 12, and a fifth of four-year-olds. But why? This ultra-addictive ­device allows for the invasion of young lives, yet it was introduced with no understanding of its perils. Parents permit their children to inhabit a two- dimensional world replete with dangers that they would never countenance in 3D. Restricting ­children to simple voice and text phones until 16 — preserving the safety dividend of mobile communication — is possible because parents hold the purse strings and telecoms companies can demand proof of age. The complaints would be loud and many. But removing or severely curtailing access to smartphones would go a long way to rediscovering something like the innocence of childhood.

You can feel the tectonic plates shifting. On Tuesday, MPs crammed into Westminster Hall to debate the impact of smartphones and social media on kids. The transcript is here. Miriam Cates gave a superb speech. Other MP colleagues like Laura Farris, Vicky Ford, Rachel Maclean and Siobhan Baillie are also very active on this.

Philippa Stroud recently organised for MPs to meet Professor Jonathan Haidt. His new book - The Anxious Generation - came out this month, which has massively accelerated the debate about children and smartphones.

Even before that, the After Babel substack, set up by Haidt with Jean Twenge, has already changed the debate.

I’ve been interested in this for a while. When I was on the Commons Science and Technology Committee in 2018 I got us to do a report on this. It recommended that “Social media companies must put robust systems in place—that go beyond a simple ‘tick box’ or entering a date of birth—to verify the age of the user.”

They still haven’t.

But the interesting thing isn’t what’s happening in Westminster.

The really interesting thing is what’s happening in the country.

Grass roots campaign groups on this issue are exploding. For this piece I talked to some of the people running them.

A recap of the problem

Here’s why so many people are concerned about this.

Kids now get given smartphones at a very early age. A quarter of UK’s three- and four-year-olds own a smartphone.

About a third of children have a social media account intended for adults only - enforcement of age limits is a joke - you just tick a box.

By the end of primary school four out of five kids have a smartphone. Parents worry they’ll miss out otherwise. They also want to keep tabs on their children, and for them to be able to ring if there’s a problem.

Over the last decade, there’s been an explosion in mental health problems among young people all over the world, over the same period that smartphones and social media became dominant in children’s lives. The growth in anxiety is focussed among young people, not oldies:

Particularly among young girls, these mental health problems are translating into real world self-harm - not just in the UK, but across the developed world:

This isn’t just more reporting of self harm either.

Since 2012, suicide rates for teenage boys in the UK have doubled. They have trebled for girls.

This chart from the Economist magazine looks across 17 countries. Teenagers and young women are the only group where suicide rates are going up. It’s down among my generation:

There are many channels through which smartphones and social media cause problems for children. They displace time in the real world with friends. US data shows that prior to 2012 children spent over two hours a day with friends. By 2019 that had halved. The proportion of kids feeling lonely and isolated at school has exploded all over the developed world.

The invention of ‘infinite scroll’ social media reminds me of the famous Bottomless Soup Bowl experiment. In the experiment, people were invited to eat from a soup bowl which was invisibly refilled from below. The constant refill made people eat nearly twice as much as with a normal bowl - in some cases absurd amounts.

But it’s not just a time sink. There’s the lack of sleep. Kids are tired in school. ADHD has increased massively, and concentration is impaired. This is a feature not a bug: apps are designed to be addictive and drip feed you dopamine.

The same problems are happening not just in the English-speaking world, but in the Nordic nations, and in Western Europe. Alternative explanations just don’t fit the data.

Attempts by the tech industry to lobby, muddy the water, run interference and sow confusion are unconvincing.

The problems aren’t just a coincidence: there’s more and more evidence for a causal link to the disaster hitting our kids. This piece, and this evidence review, collect some of the evidence.

Sapien Labs asked questions about adults’ mental health and combined them into a Mental Health Quotient (MHQ). They asked the same people when they got a smartphone. 28,000 people answered and the results are stark: the earlier you get a phone, the worse your mental health - particularly for girls:

Obviously smartphones are NOT the only thing going on in mental health. Pieces like this one by Pete are right to cite social breakdown, drugs and adverse childhood experiences as the drivers of much of mental illness. If you work with today’s 40-50 somethings, their problems are caused by these things, not smartphones.

Indeed, Haidt and others have also been amassing data on the end of the risk-taking, free-wandering, play-based childhood and the over-restriction of children.

His thesis basically has two parts: that we have protected kids too much in the real world and not enough online.

But social breakdown is the (depressing) baseload which we have had for a couple of decades now - the recent change we see among children across the world since 2012 is best explained by smartphones and social media.

The other day our daughter (aged 8) asked for the first time if she can have a phone when she is a bit bigger. Thanks to her wonderful mum, her childhood currently involves playing a lot of football, Taekwondo, Lego and something called “ninja warriors”. I think about her life now, then think about the graphs above.

Many parents know the problems with smartphones, but we face a collective action problem. We worry our kids will miss out if they are the only ones without them. That’s the problem that needs solving.

Fortunately, there are people trying to solve it.

A new social movement

I talked to some of the new campaign groups trying to fix this problem. They all talk to each other and have very similar demands and goals, but slightly different specialisms.

Safe Screens

I spoke to Bella Skinner from Safe Screens, which is the oldest and got going at the end of 2022. They have done a brilliant job of amassing and spreading the data on the problem. Ahead of last week’s debate MPs received a great briefing from them. Bella makes the point that big tech firms want to shirk responsibility. Firms say everything will be fine if you just use their parental controls. But, as she points out, “It’s a full-time job to manage the parental controls, and they aren’t that useful.”

Safe Screens are pushing for social media for kids to be treated like tobacco, with clear health warnings. One of their supporters is super head teacher, Katherine Birbalsingh. Bella pointed out to me the incredibly strong evidence that (truly) phone-free schools see big educational gains: children at schools with an effective ban achieved GCSE results that were 1 – 2 grades higher. As Bella said: “we’d spend billions to get those kind of gains.” Sadly, a recent Policy Exchange report suggests that only one in ten secondary schools has an effective ban on phones in school.

Along with their other proposals, Safe Screens have been making the case and working to create an industry standard for a phone and apps to create a new market for child-appropriate restricted smartphones. Kids would get a basic phone, with texts, some things like maps and tickets, maybe even a function to call the NSPCC… but not a browser or social media. Parents who wanted to could stick a tracker on it.

A simple ban on selling smartphones to kids would likely be limited in its effect, not least because many or most kids get their parents’ cast-off smartphones. Bella makes a point I think is really smart: we need to give the companies incentives to sell something responsible, not just try and stop them selling stuff that is bad for kids. You could even give them a tax break.

She also makes a good and nuanced point: we should aim for the minimum norm for the age where kids get smartphones to be after GCSEs rather than “at age 16” - it’s not a good idea to do give kids smartphones when they are studying for their exams.

Delay Smartphones

I spoke to Hannah Oertel from Delay Smartphones. Like so many people in this debate, she has a horror story: her daughter (10) went to a choir rehearsal and a boy showed her a video of a man being beheaded. Sadly, this sort of thing is very common. 4,053 parents from 2,000 different schools have signed their pledge to delay giving their kids smartphones.

Their tactic is to recruit and train volunteer ambassadors to persuade whole year groups of parents to hold off giving their kids smartphones. They have trained 350 volunteer ambassadors and given them materials and training. Hannah is a life coach and has done lots of work on how persuasion works, including studying hostage negotiators. She’s sought to understand why people give kids smartphones: “you can’t just tell people they are wrong”.

As well as the big collective action problem, parents want their kids to be able to ring if there is a problem. Often they want to put a tracker on the phone too.

Delay Smartphones are also working towards getting whole classes of children dumbphones. Hannah highlighted existing dumbphones like the Nokia 105. It doesn’t have some things like maps as a bespoke device for kids could have. It just does texts and phone calls. But they already exist, are only £20 brand new - and much cheaper reconditioned. And a basic phone and text contract is £4 a month. So for the price of one new iPhone (£800-1000) you could fund a whole class (in year 6 or 7) to have dumbphones, and so change the norm, and stop kids being given smartphones to take to school. If any philanthropists are reading, this would be a brilliant thing to support.

Smartphone Free Childhood

Smartphone Free Childhood has been created by friends Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough. They set up a WhatsApp group to support each other in sending their children to school without smartphones. By the next morning, their WhatsApp group was already at capacity, with 1,024 members.

In February they had about 4,500 members. They now have somewhere around 80,000.

Members sign up to local Whatsapp groups, arranged by counties, and different parts of London. They are encouraging people to write to their MP, and I have had quite a few letters as a result. They’re encouraging people to form local parent pacts to delay giving their children smartphones for a year, or until 14 or 15. You can join here.

In an article, Daisy sets out their goals:

• Force the social media platforms to comply with UK law by removing the millions of under 13 year olds from their sites (38% of 5-7 year olds in the UK use social media). 

• Raise the minimum age restriction on social media platforms to 16. Until the tech companies can prove their apps are safe for children, children should not be on them.

• Mandate that children under 16 are not allowed unrestricted smartphones. Do so by creating a new market opportunity: a compulsory category of under 16 phones and app stores, neither of which allow access to algorithm-driven apps or open web browsers.

I spoke to Jennifer Powers, who helps run their South-West London group, with about 3,000 members. She didn’t buy the industry-pushed idea that parental filters are the answer: “I have three degrees and can’t make the filters really work”. Interestingly, she told me that younger parents were much keener on this agenda. Compared to parents coming of age ten years ago, more of them have seen the evidence (and the real world effects) and are more worried. Looking at the SFC WhatsApp group chats, one of the most tricky dynamics to navigate is how to manage the idea of a “pact” for a class when there are some parents who have already given their kids smartphones at a very early age. Getting ahead of these decisions makes things much, much easier.

What the campaigners are up against: the tobacco parallel and fake solutions

In the bad old days, the tobacco industry knew that its product killed people, but told people that as long as you were smoking with a “filter” it would be perfectly healthy. No cancer for you, as long as your tobacco was “toasted”. Good enough for doctors to smoke, in fact. People liked the reassurance of the fake solutions.

Years later all the documents got released, and it turned out the companies knew it was a lie all along. People can be ruthless when there’s big money to be made.

The parallels are unmissable. Famously, social media bosses don’t let their own kids near their product. Fastcompany reported that:

Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, revealed in 2018 that his 11-year-old son did not have a phone. The following year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that he didn’t want his young children sitting in front of a computer “for a long period of time.” One former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, put it more bluntly, saying that he felt “tremendous guilt” about helping to build the social network and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.”

Industry whistleblowers like Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, have put shown the tech firms know their products are harmful.

But again, we have a multi-billion dollar industry putting up ads saying their product is fine for kids as long as you “use the filter”.

Everyday I walk through Westminster tube I see ads aimed at MPs from firms like Meta and Snapchat and TikTok. There are pics of parents and cute kids and parents enjoying being on their phones together. The message is: it’s all fine, the age controls are working great.

But half of nine-year-olds use social media, and so do 38% of 5-7 year olds. Those controls clearly aren’t working any better than “filtered” cigarettes did. And just look at the graphs above. Those “controls” and filters have been around for ages. They just clearly aren’t working, and have done nothing to stop the crisis.

I have friends who think the devices are fine, a long as you use the controls.

I don’t buy it. Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message.” He was writing mainly about TV. He meant that, as well as what people were watching, it mattered that people were just sitting there passively in their own homes, not out and about.

You can (unsuccessfully) try and filter out the worst social media content. But even if you could, lots of time on smartphones can isolate us, and for young people they provide an infinite scroll through the edited highlights of other people’s lives and seemingly perfect body images. Just being ‘stuck on the phone’, a lot, even if the content isn’t terrible, changes children’s lives. The medium is the message.

It’s costing taxpayers too. The number of kids on Disability Living Allowance for mental health conditions (ADHD, behavioural disorders, etc) has increased constantly over the last decade, rocketing from just over 60,000 in 2012, to 225,000 last August.

Despite this social dumping, the framing pushed by the industry is basically very similar to the line that: “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.

“Kids have to learn sometime”, they say. But given what we now know, this makes no more sense that saying we can give children guns, drink and tobacco “as long as we show them how to use them right”. Older people aren’t seeing their mental health worsen and suicides increase because of smartphones, but children are.

Conclusions

I’m struck that this revolution against the tech goliaths is being spearheaded mainly by women. Bella, Hannah, Daisy, Clare, Jean, Rachel, Jenny… they are all really thoughtful and inspiring women. Likewsise MPs like Miriam, Laura, Rachel and Siobhan. And a lot of the press coverage is by female journalists too. Women are seeing the problem more clearly and more closely.

When you talk to kids, many have seen stuff they didn’t want to see, and loads of children would be super happy if the rules changed so that no-one was on these things (they just don’t want to be left out). Gen-Z have a lot of nostalgia (or rather anemoia) for the pre-smartphone world.

Parents know for themselves how addictive these things are - even for grownups - and how they take you out of the moment, out of being really present.

Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, has said: “I honestly think that we will look back in 20 years’ time and be absolutely horrified by what we allowed our children to be exposed to.” She’s right.

The first thing government should do is implement a proper ban on phones in schools. Instead of weak guidance, all schools should be mandated and funded to have lockers and pouches, and put kids smartphones away for the whole day, including breaks. Schools should be the beachhead, and first place we recreate a smartphone-free childhood. Seven hours in which we de-normalise being on the phone all the time for young people.

The second is action to help enforce age controls on social media - given that tech firms have totally failed to enforce their own rules. Until recently the government was promising backbenchers a consultation on just that. In April it was about to be published.

Now it has mysteriously disappeared. I don’t know why. As well as the tech firms’ guff about parental controls as the answer, there’s also a bad argument being pushed by some children’s charities. They say that “hidden vulnerable” kids need 24/7 internet access to report abuse. But kids can speak to teachers, and get the numbers they can call drummed into them at school. 24/7 access to phones is exposing kids to risks much more frequently than it saves them from risks. The same people sometimes argue kids have a “right” to be online. I say 10 year-olds have a “right” not to see beheadings and porn. They have a “right” to the kind of childhood full of real-world play that we got to enjoy.

I don’t know what’s going on with the consultation. I do know that with the debate shifting fast, and parents now mobilising across the country, it would be tragic if the government chose this moment to bottle it.