Letter: A case against the under-16 ban

The recent coverage in Solidarity on protecting under-16s from harmful social media has been good. We should also note some important arguments against copying Australia’s remedy of a blanket ban on all social media use by under-16s.

The Molly Rose Foundation, a group set up after 14-year old Molly Russell was pulled into killing herself by algorithms on social media taking her further and further into thinking that way, notes:

“Recent... polling.. revealed a majority of Australian children still use restricted social media apps despite the ban for under-16s”. That’s just counting under-16s who report that their social media accounts are still functioning despite the ban.

It doesn’t include the under-16s who will not report using their ingenuity (often sharper than the wit of government officials) to evade the ban via devices and accounts registered to older people.

A shortcoming of the “ban” remedy, it seems to me, is that by driving under-16 social-media use into a “black market”, it works against troubled under-16s seeking help from parents, carers, teachers, or peers when they feel dragged down by what they get on social media.

Harm

And, of course, being 17, or 71 for that matter, does not make you immune to harm from social media.

The Molly Rose Foundation wants “a strengthened Online Safety Act to go further than a blanket ban and tackles harm at source on all platforms, including gaming and AI”.

It notes that “social media platforms put profit before safety and exposed Molly to a dark world of harmful content which played a significant role in her death... product choices... continued to feed her with depressive content, and an endless stream of recommended posts that promoted suicide and self-harm”.

Trying to fix that “at source” - by public ownership and democratic control of those social media platforms - could of course drift towards censorship. That could have bad effects politically, and be counter-productive safety-wise by creating space for outside-the-law “black market” platforms.

But more or less no-one, scarcely even Elon Musk, denies outright the case for some “moderation” of social media. That can surely be done democratically rather than relying on the tech billionaires to rein in their lust for market share.

And then there’s the argument made by Ruth Cashman, with which I agree entirely, for more scope for young people to socialise in real life rather than online. §

Colin Foster, London