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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What announcement did UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer make regarding social media?
This morning, Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood behind a podium and made an announcement that upset a lot of UK teens, although it probably pleased their parents.
This is not something I do lightly, and I will not present it as cost-free, as if social media has brought no benefits to young people, because clearly that is wrong. But government is always about choices. And it's clear to me that a full ban is the right choice.
Under 16s will be banned from some of the big apps like TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and X. It comes in response to growing concerns that social media is one of the driving forces behind the youth mental health crisis.
It will make a huge difference. It will make our children safer. It will make our children happier. It will give them more time, more security, more freedom to grow up, more opportunity.
The UK isn't alone in taking this step. Australia has already enacted a ban. France and Canada are in the process of bringing one in. And Spain and Portugal have announced plans to do so. Our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone. Space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation, violence. We will no longer accept that.
But will taking away access to teenagers' favourite online spaces help? How will the whole thing work? And could there be unintended consequences? Today, we discuss all the evidence and ask, should teens be banned from social media? I'm The Guardian's science editor, Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly.
Maddy, I'm sure when a lot of teenagers woke up this morning, they were in an even worse mood than usual because we heard that Keir Starmer hopes to ban access to some of the big social media sites for under-16s by spring 2027. Where did this come from then?
Well, this move is both a little surprising and then absolutely not surprising. For a long time, it seemed like Keir Starmer wasn't actually that keen on a ban or at least was quite sceptical about enacting one. But pressure has been mounting from all directions for a little while now.
So in January, 60 Labour MPs wrote to the Prime Minister calling for a ban following Australia's that came into force in December. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has been vocal on this too. And so the government has been doing this consultation and they received about 116,000 responses. So this was the second largest government consultation in history.
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Chapter 3: What concerns are driving the proposed social media ban for under-16s?
They also showed that children with low well-being or those with special educational needs were at even greater risk of seeing this kind of content.
MUSIC Okay, Maddy, so there have been some really awful, really heartbreaking examples of how social media can and does cause harm. But where does the wider evidence stand on how social media is impacting children and teenagers?
think the first thing to say here is that this is a really difficult thing to study on a kind of population level right because the moment you start asking what's the impact of social media on adolescents you immediately run into questions like is it time spent on social media or is it time spent on the phone itself is it time not doing other stuff like going to the park is
Is it that young people who are struggling already with mental health problems are more likely to use social media more or in a different unhealthy way? It's very difficult to do the kind of experiment you might want to do to figure it out, which would be getting a group of kids saying, some, you use social media this amount, some not using this.
social media at all, doing other things on their phone like, hey, reading The Guardian, and then having some kids that are not using phones at all. But without that, so far in terms of the research that we have on this, you only really have correlational studies. So looking at the wider data and looking at trends, and some researchers have pointed out that the conclusions from these studies are
small and mixed anyway. And I was looking actually at a big review done a few years ago by a scientist that we've had on this podcast, Amy Orban. She studies the impact of digital technology on young people, and she's given evidence on bringing in social media restrictions to the government.
And her review found that the evidence was pretty lacking in terms of its quality, but that the overall association between digital technology and psychological well-being, it was negative, but it was very small.
So there isn't any good population-wide evidence that social media is harmful?
No, there is better evidence when you look at excessive use. So, for example, a study of 90,000 children born at the start of the millennium found that the rates of depression went up in line with time spent on social media. And this was particularly true for girls.
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Chapter 4: How do other countries handle social media restrictions for minors?
Clearly, companies haven't made their platforms safe enough in the eyes of government and parents. So what's left? But Ian, let's talk about the evidence for a ban. Because actually, there isn't any. And that's because the only ban in place has only been operating for six months.
And Amy Alban, the researcher that I mentioned, she actually announced in January a plan to study 4,000 children in Bradford... And participants in this study would be put in groups where one would have their social media time curtailed to one hour a day. And so that was the kind of study that I was describing earlier that you would want. Now, they do expect to get the results from this in 2027.
So that's potentially after the ban's been enacted anyway. But just because there's a lack of evidence, it isn't necessarily an argument against it. Some people might say that we need to be proactive in reducing potential risks.
And, you know, I have seen this argument that if there was anything else that had clear, specific individual cases of children being harmed, say, you know, if it was a toy, that that thing would be banned and recalled, right? So you can see it from that point of view.
Coming up, is a ban really the best way to keep young people safe online? 33 days, 33 episodes, no off switch. From the goals and the glories of the politics and the problems of the World Cup, if you want football analysis from a podcast that's been overanalyzing the game for more than 20 years, this is it.
Join me, Max Rushton, and our expert team of football journalists every day of the tournament. Can England end 60 years of hurt? Probably not. Or will this be another year of falling just short? Probably. World Cup Daily. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episodes on YouTube.
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Maddy, there are arguments against a ban.
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Chapter 5: What evidence exists about the impact of social media on youth mental health?
What are those?
Absolutely. So it's likely that young people will find other places online. Then you also have to consider the benefits of social media for young people. It might be connecting with family, friends or people like you, you know, beginning to work out who you are, maybe accessing support, important information. This is especially important for teens from marginalised groups.
Plenty of LGBTQ plus adolescents see social media as a real lifeline. Beyond these benefits, there's the question of what happens when teenagers turn 16. Are they going to be thrown into social media when they're at an age where they're more independent anyway? And some people have called this a potential cliff edge.
You have to ask yourself, does this ban risk letting companies off the hook from removing that harmful content and restricting these features that make it, you know, make it what it is? Amnesty International has called the ban the right diagnosis, the wrong prescription.
And to that point, Biban Kidron, a member of the House of Lords and a social activist who advocates for children's rights in the digital world... She said she'd turn the argument around and instead of denying children access to apps, tech companies should be denied access to children until they can guarantee respect, privacy and safety.
So how will it be enacted? How do you ban under-16s from social media?
The first thing that will probably happen is that accounts of under 16s will be deleted. Then for the accounts that say they are 16 and above, I would imagine then age verification. So that's what's happened in Australia. So you have to prove that you're 16 and above. Kids, of course, can get around these things.
I saw one very funny example of kids using AI image generation to give themselves mustaches. Which, you know, sort of bypasses the face scanning stuff. Anyway, there's also VPNs. So these are tools that you can use where your device thinks you're in another country, a country that doesn't have this kind of ban. And...
I will say that six months on from the ban in Australia, there's been mixed reports of how it's working and how parents are feeling about it. An article in The Guardian chatting to a few different parents about this, you know, some said it was worthwhile, that it was a tool that was allowing them to kind of battle the devices.
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