Dr. Xanthe Weston

provide them the social interaction and skills when they've been stripped of that.

Huge difference in social development, you know, and especially for teenagers, those pre-teens, teens who were hitting those ages where social interaction was important.

And we gave them this really warped world in which they lived online for likes.

And we're still seeing that play out now.

We haven't had that.

And I don't think the ban on under-16s on social media has really helped.

They found a way around it.

Platforms aren't necessarily being particularly supportive of that ban.

So I think there are some things that we can do to help...

help kind of drive kids away from these activities.

I think education, we need to educate them and the parents, but an education campaign needs to be from the other young people.

Maybe young people have been caught up in this, who've seen the problems, who've suffered the consequences.

Just that they're really trying to tackle this harm being caused to young people and how to educate them and divert them away from engaging in the activities.

So they've set up all kinds of educational platforms and a lot of that I think is being driven by young people.

Because, like, we can sit here and we can talk to young people till we're blue in the fleece and a 16, 17-year-old is going to look at me and think I'm super uncool, although I like to think I'm cool.

But, you know, kids look at us and go, what do they know, right?

But another 17-year-old who's maybe been to juvenile detention or who was harmed in a firebombing or something, they can reach them on a different level.

So I think we're seeing that kind of thing being trialled, like how to reach these young people.

that's going to be a lot more successful.

But also, I think we need to take away the rewards generally on these platforms, the likes, the posts, the boasting, the algorithmic upscaling of harmful content.