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Chapter 1: What evidence supports the social media ban for under-16s?
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Hello, I'm Tom Whipple and welcome to Inside Science from the BBC World Service. The thing about football, said the author Terry Pratchett, the important thing about football is that it is not just about football.
Chapter 2: What questions do teenagers have about the social media ban?
Here at Inside Science, we agree. Don't worry, this is still a safe space, a World Cup exclusion zone, just about. For the next half hour, we have no interest here in Harry Kane's left foot, Ronaldinho's right foot, Zidane's forehead, or whatever body part is pertinent to whatever other footballer is famously good at doing ball-related things with it.
But that doesn't mean we aren't into the footy. When the world gets together to watch those feet and balls and foreheads to cheer, commiserate, celebrate, that means only one thing. Statistical power. Psychology studies at scale. Science. From the epidemiology of population scale sleeplessness to the optimal game theoretical strategies in shootouts and beyond. What can we learn from football?
Chapter 3: How do experts assess the impact of social media on mental health?
That new segment comes later. And with it is Kit Yates, maths prof and football fan, who will be our boot boy as we choose a World Cup squad of science. Hi, Kit. Hi, Tom. Thanks for that. First, though, this will be the last World Cup where teens in Britain can follow the games on social media. This week, the UK government announced under-16s would soon be banned.
And the kids, well, they're not all right with that. And they have questions.
I would like to know why they chose under-16s and not like under-14s or under-17s.
Chapter 4: What are the potential consequences of banning social media?
Are you sure the ban will really work? As Britain follows Australia in banning teens on social media, it is, said one politician, a defining moment. It is, said one teen, a waste of time. They look forward, they said, to a future staring at a wall. How do we decide who is right?
We spoke to Professor Amy Orban, programme lead of the Digital Mental Health Group at the University of Cambridge, and Dr Catherine Sebastian, Head of Evidence at Wellcome. But first, we asked a group of Year 9 students at Clifton High School in Bristol what questions they have about the ban.
How long did it take for the scientists to come to the conclusion that these apps needed to be banned?
What's the thought process behind banning communication? Because a lot of people talk to people using Snapchat and stuff like that.
Chapter 5: How does the valuation of football players relate to traffic accidents?
I'm wondering if once people reach the age of 16, they might go on it even more, because it's the forbidden thing they're now allowed to have access to.
How did the scientists come to a conclusion that that specific app is not safe for young people?
Is it purely based on mental health and addiction, or is there a different factor?
Does social media have a different impact on our brain to adults?
My parents say I'm addicted. Will I go through withdrawal?
Do the scientists think that children's brains are developing differently to how their parents' brains did when they were kids? Do you think the way that we'll interact with one another change?
Amy and Kat, welcome. Amy, there's lots of fascinating questions asked there by those students, but I think the biggest question of all is, what's the evidence so far?
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Chapter 6: What insights can penalty shootouts provide about international diplomacy?
I think there's different ways to look at evidence in this space. Naturally, technology is really fast moving and companies don't provide a lot of access to data or resources to test the impacts and the safety. So I think evidence is evolving. We have pretty good evidence that it has harmed individual young people, right?
Coroners have found that some young people have died partially because of what content they've been exposed to on social media. Individual harm of severe harm is enough evidence to cause major policy change. In those studies with young adults, we do see that there's much better evidence of reduction in social media use leading to improvements in well-being.
While abstinent from social media completely, the evidence is still much more mixed and difficult to interpret.
What about wider population correlations?
Chapter 7: How do game theory strategies apply to penalty kicks in football?
I mean, how much of this is, I know scientists are incredibly wary about things like causality, but how much of this is simply looking at two graphs, one of which is social media use and the other is teen mental health?
Yes, you're right, right? We've seen teen mental health decline from the time that social media or smartphones were released. And actually, there was a similar time there was an economic crash. There's been a lot of other changes happening. going on. And there's been a lot of debate what they say or what not.
We wouldn't expect evidence to be great, just given the lack of the raw materials for proper science to be done. And so I think it's critical for us not to just talk about is there evidence or is there not? But what are the risks of different options?
Chapter 8: What broader societal implications arise from the discussion on football and science?
What's the risk of saying there potentially isn't an impact when in five years, we found out that there has been? And I think that helps policymakers make those judgments. I think in this space, they'll always have to be gambles, policy gambles based on the best evidence available.
And you're currently involved in efforts to get evidence. Talk us through what you're doing.
We are running a world first trial up in Bradford where thousands of school children will be randomized in whole school year groups to either just use social media as they did before or to be given a curfew on their social media use and a reduction. And that will happen in the fall. And the plan was that in early 2027, we could then give some of that really important causal evidence or evidence
leading onto that causal evidence around whether social media might be impacting young people and how that intervention works.
So a randomised controlled trial, that's rather than making a big population difference where you don't know whether team mental health has changed because of the financial crash in 2008 or the iPhone in 2008, you can say it is this thing, will you be able to get an answer before they're all banned from using social media?
So we will do it all in the autumn and be done by December.
Kat, you're involved in Europe Welcome and you're involved in trying to get evidence. What's your take on this? What is Welcome hoping to now get from the UK ban and from what's going on now?
Yeah, so Wellcome's one of the largest global funders of mental health research. And the digital world is a massive part of everyday life for young people. So we actually got involved in this space, funding the trial that Amy talked about, because we really wanted to move the evidence beyond the associational evidence that you've discussed today.
whereby it's very hard to know whether social media is actually causal for mental health problems, and really try and unpick whether social media restriction is something that could actually help young people.
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