Should We Ban Under-16s from Social Media? | Matthew Lesh

0:00Rather than try to address what the harms are, or use social media in a better way, or really even scrutinise the evidence base that we begin with. The easiest solution here is, yeah, let's just put it in a band. That'll be as yes. I'm just going to stop the question of using social media. What you're going to stop is the ability to use those safe accounts, the accounts that are designed for younger people. And then you're also creating, for parents, a false sense of security here, and your potential, just telling kids, well, don't go speak to your parents or something goes wrong, because you're being a bit naughty to be on that platform. The idea that you don't want something to have access to the most powerful tools to learn, to explore the world, to register yourselves in something that's going to be quite essential. Yes, 50 years, you know. You're going to cut them off from AI, and it seems totally mad, as opposed to... Hello and welcome to the Institute of Economic Affairs podcast. I'm Colin Price today. I'm delighted to be joined by our public policy fellow, Matthew Lesch. Matthew, thank you for joining us. Great to be back. We are here to talk about the stuff that you know really well.

1:00The social media ban and the debate around it. In Australia, they've kicked off a ban four under 16s, of course, loads of social media, which we've talked a few times about on the podcast before. But I want to dive into what the problem is, what's going on, what the solutions are that are being discussed both in Australia and over here, and why they may or may not work. So to start us off, what exactly is the problem that people are trying to address here? You know, because it's often not particularly well-defined, but there seems to be this theory of harm around social media at young people, where social media is held responsible for a whole wide range of ills from the rise of extremism to children's mental health issues. There's a sense that basically screen time has become dominant in young people's lives, and that's resulting in them being less capable of making social connections. It means there's maybe less time outdoors with each other, and that's having really detrimental impacts. And of course, you've got quite tragic case studies,

2:00also where individuals have been abused or bullied online, and then that's resulted in real world harm. So you've got a few different kinds of interrelated reasons for concern for social media, and I think you have this sense that it's new technology. It's uncertain, it's unknown. I'm still, even though perhaps, you know, we've had social media for a moment of a decade, but it just caused untold harm and it's causing untold harm. Rather than try to address what the harms are, or use social media in a better way, or really even scrutinize the evidence base that we begin with, scrutinize these very big and broad claims that are made. And the easiest solution here is, yeah, let's just put it in a bin. That'll be easiest, and we're just going to stop the concern of using social media. A prohibition is a solution, yeah. What does the evidence actually say about those harms? Is that all those bad things happening, first of all, and are they happening because of social media, second of all? You know, we shouldn't be dismissive of the fact that social media can be harmful to some people, and it can be used in problematic ways. You know, things can go wrong on these platforms. That clearly has happened. I mean, that's, you know, a risk and a concern that needs to be managed,

3:03and educated, and ensure that the kids have the right tools, and able to connect with the right people. Are these big, grand claims around social media harm, and let's say, some of the workshops and heights done around the angstress generation, and the reason why you have the rise in, let's say, to this other side, it comes back to social media. It's far less clear than it's often made out with, and the people who are, the closest researchers in this space, John Hyde is not a researcher in social media spaces, he's somebody who brings together a lot of information. The people who have worked in this space are a lot more skeptical about the strength of the connections, or even, and the capacity of social media, of course, harm. So, I mean, Amy Aubin of Oxford University, she talks about the very small correlation between time spent online, and incidents of mental health problems, and she compares it to the, you know, the same, it's the same with like a kid wearing glasses, maybe there's a slightly, you know, you can see a very small signal within the, within the data, but it's not like a major cause of mental health issues. I mean, you can think about this in different ways,

4:03which is, do you see mental health issues increasing, as social media arrives in different countries, different times, or social media uptake increases? Not really. So, you know, we do, we do, probably, maybe have, you know, to pick on how you measure those things, but it increases in mental health issues amongst young brits. Now, that's not necessarily universal, it's doesn't happen everywhere in the social media. So, other things going on within society, that could be potentially causing harm. Is it possible that social media is like a clutch? So, for people who already have mental health issues, maybe it gets a bit worse as a result of social media. So, like, it's, the evidence by serious, far more complex, and certainly not the point is putting a ban. And the other point is what I make here, of course, is for many kids, social media can be hugely beneficial. And so, when you're talking about harms, you also need to talk about and weigh benefits. What are the connections people are able to make online? What are the communities that they're able to form? Are they able to learn on social media sites, you know? What role, you know, there's something that I think is really underappreciated in the Australian debate. What you're saying is that other 16s aren't able to access platforms where news and politics happens, like X.

5:06Is that really the conclusion you want to get to, that they should have no say in modern debate, because, you know, not until you are at a 16s issue, you have access to these particular websites. And it's a very extreme position to take, whilst, of course, the acknowledging that you do want to ensure kids are safe online and that they behave and are properly. But as soon as you forget or don't pay attention to or don't put enough weight on the benefits of social media, you downplay the costs of banning social media. So, what is, Australia, have implemented a ban, I think, kicked off late 2025. Talk us through what exactly the shape of that is and how it's going so far even though it's only days. Yes, so the social media in Australia is actually relatively more limited than I think it's been made out to be in international circles. So, the ban in Australia is an element on the ability to make it counts. On relatively actually small numbers set a social media website. So, the kind of, the major social media site, so you're talking about things like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X.

6:10Other than that, YouTube, you can't have an account on Beacon's social videos on YouTube. So, the platform itself is not banned, but the ability to make an account is banned. Or so, what does that actually take away? Budget to comment, budget to post. Ability to comment, ability to post. Ability actually for kids to make their own videos. So, if you were 14, 15, and you want to be part of the creative economy, you can't make an account and upload your own videos. The same story obviously with TikTok or Instagram. You can't be a young person who wants to engage and be a content creator. And so, you move the ability also to make the platforms kind of more, in some ways actually more relevant and safer for them. Because a lot of platforms, the large ones, have actually child safety, safe accounts. So, there's, and this is where the risk comes. So, what's happened in Australia is that there has been a significant reduction in the number of accounts and there's something like four or five million reduction accounts. Maybe that's about two per person. And at the same time, though, you've seen a huge spike in BP and usage. You've got some initial surveys indicating that there's a lot of skepticism about whether or not the online space has been made any safer.

7:13As a result of these bands, there was one quote I spotted an economist saying, everyone I know probably found a way around the band and it hasn't really changed much. So, there's been a lot of non-compliance with the band itself. So, it hasn't necessarily worked, but it is actually where I think up. The risk of the bands come in, which is, you're not only are stock kids particularly and ones who are intent on a particular outcome, being able to access social media. Well, you're going to stop is their ability to use those safer accounts, the accounts that are designed for younger people because they're not going to exist, they can't exist in Australia, those kind of accounts. And then you're also creating for parents a false sense of security here and your potential, you're telling kids, well, don't go speak to your parents or something goes wrong because you're being a bit naughty to be on that platform. So, rather than having an open conversation and dialogue between parents and kids about what they're doing online, you're just saying bad, bad, stop. This is a classic, we're going to ban something rather than take a harm reduction approach. We're going to say, we're not going to acknowledge that this thing existed or rather than saying, how can we accept that social media

8:13is a modern part of life? A lot of people can use it very positively. Some people in some sort of circumstances are going to have a bad experience with it and what can we do to try to improve that? This is the whole thing about these things, which is it is a reflection of humanity, the best and the worst, the most innovative, capable scientific research being shared and solving mammoth problems that society faces at one extreme. And at the other extreme, people are taking incremental behaviors and you're going to get the whole spectrum of things in the real world as you do in the online world. And at the eccentricity online world as an extension of humanity, we're going to have to deal with both ends of that and we're going to try to take as much of the good and deal with as much of the bad as we can. It also distrips good much of your parental point. Strips responsibility from parents and puts it in the hands of the state. So people grow up thinking, actually, I want to speak to my parents because this is a role for the government and for the state, which sort of breeds a sort of lack of responsibility, low-trust, low-responsibility culture that breeds all sorts of problems down the line as well.

9:13What then is happening on this side of the planet in the UK? There seems to be quite a lot of quite a positive reaction to the Australia band by from a lot of MPs and parliament, not least the Conservative party and government. Talk us through what's going on here. You know what I find this quite fascinating because it's interesting, we really don't know whether the Australian band has been effective. We don't know whether there has been effective in the sense of has an actual kids off social media. We don't know if it's been effective in the sense of well, if it has gone in kids off social media, is there meant to hold improving? And the Australian government is effectively partaking in a social experiment and a mass scale on Australia's children and we don't know the answer and it's far too soon to say. It's about two, three months, two and a half months since that social media band started in Australia. We're not going to know if it's every years when it's gone well or badly. But despite that, you very quickly, just the mere implementation of the band led to calls for kind of copycat policy making and that there's now happening just sections all over the world. The UK being one of the leaders in it, particularly with the House of Lords pushing this.

10:13And the government has released and just came out this week, got released in new consultation on another 16 social media band amongst other things. And currently it's effective with the government's in the kind of asking questions more. So it's a three, well it's actually long for government consultation. I would say this is process wise, significantly better than what Australia did. The Australian social media band, the legislative process from introduction to parliament to roll, a cent was about eight to 10 days. There was one weekend, one day of open submissions and the parliament's requiring this like lasted one day. There's certainly a very little process and very leaveness on which to claim that this band would be effective in any meaningful way. Now they do a little bit longer to pull it full in sleep, full in defect. So what the UK's done is said that they put together a consultation which actually does acknowledge some of the positives of social media. It says we're concerned about these kind of features and these things that exist on some social media platforms. You know, they're trying to do a consultation with kids and parents a bit more around this

11:14that the Australian government didn't really tend to do. And they're trying to say, you know, how are we going to try to make social media safer for young people? Now I think to some extent, you don't want to over-promise on this thing. This is the Hop of the Noise Safety Act. So we, according to, you know, everyone who advocate if you want to say to yourself, these things should already be a safe place. But of course, it's not right. Just creating like a regulatory framework and saying that you have all these duties, you have to do all this sort of paperwork. Like all that kind of stuff is, like, you know, on the face of it, just got to lead to a very good and very successful practice by a bunch of more firms who specialize in legal compliance with social media companies. It's not necessarily going to make kids safer. And I think that's, that is dawning. That is dawned on the advocates for child safety, who actually have been disappointed by the existing regime. They think off-com isn't doing enough. And off-com is doing a lot. But like, there's no, there's no magic powder. There's no way to make the world a perfectly safe place. Like we accept when a kid goes to a playground that, you know, there's a risk like a trip and fall. And we accept when they go to school or some other child could bully them. And then we try to deal with that and we try to educate the children, you know, obviously not to bully each other. You know, there can be these, like, social and physical harms that exist in the world.

12:14And so then this conversation is trying to say, well, how are we going to try to, at least, I think, from a fairer perspective, we're saying, okay, we've got this harms. What are we going to do about it? But then again, the approach for the UK government could either be more minimalistic than what Australia has done or based on this consultation could be far wider. Yeah. Yeah. So on that, one of the things that struck me from the conversation was the looking at chatbots and AI. Because as far as it's come in, because obviously defining social media is actually a pretty nebulous term. It can be anything from just X-Facebook and Instagram to basically most of the internet. Yeah. So what is the scope of it? It sounds like it could go out of the way. Yeah, but really go the way. So I mean, there's a bit of discussion in the consultation about a more limited set of focus platforms for a ban. But of course, if you look at the art, the, um, it was originally quoted at you. So there's a concept of the online safety actor of user-to-user services, which is originally about 20,000 services. I've heard recently off-com now because this is about 150,000 services. And that is literally any platform where two people communicate with each other. And that is extremely bought by the way.

13:14That is, that is WhatsApp. Yeah. That is a discussion forum on cycling. And we actually saw after the online safety that came into effect that a whole bunch of solar forums could have complied with the set of regulations that the government created. And therefore, they shut that to be shut down. Not because our column is going after them. Not because there were any child safety issues. Just simply the risk assessments and that the regulatory compliance that came with the act was so extraordinarily broad and wide. And you have to, again, ask yourself, what is going on here? You know, nobody thinks these had its particularly now particularly safer place because of this act and yet, with VOS kind of what would be social and community goods because of this regulatory framework. So yeah, the consultation could mean that in theory, at least, the government opens the idea of applying a social under-16s ban to everything, including all sorts of different sites. Now that, of course, then, raises all sorts of issues around age or efficacy, again, and who, you have to identify someone before they're able to use any kind of site or any kind of functionality within your site. And on the other hand, on the government, might go quite nitpicky, so they might say, well, we're going to ban certain features for under-16s, and they'll make a determination

14:15of what they think are problematic features. Again, I don't think they're necessarily, that's going to be a bit of a stab in the dark, because we don't, again, there's some good evidence on, you know, scrolling or something. You know, is scrolling the problem? How are you going to mind scrolling on social media? Like, scrolling is pretty essential to every website, and being able to scroll through things and go to new pieces of content. Like, you don't really have social media without scrolling or without the ability to find new things. So how are we going to ban that? Or are you going to do, like, overnight curfews or something that people seem to quite like? People want to try and, like, the Chinese government, they limit kids access to social media, and as if that's some kind of admirable thing to do to set curfews on access to information. Or it's like, they always say that the version of TikTok in China only has educational material. I'm like, yeah, there isn't a lot of political freedom of speech in Canberra, that it's, sorry, in China, is there now. I just did a 40, so there's a lot of political freedom of speech in Canberra, maybe there isn't. So, but do you think that there is... First of all, the flea market, classical liberal, small state position on this sort of argument would often land,

15:16but actually the private sector can do this much better than the government can. And that there are plenty of safeguards already in place, which there are across social media platforms, there's YouTube kids, there's lots of things you can do, and also there's a parental control. The market, you could say, is responded. Right. So, to concern about social media, amongst kids, you know, you can make an argument that social media isn't as harmful as it was as it sometimes may not to be, but also that it's the extent to which there are harms, you know, there's an effort to make to respond to it. And obviously, parents also at the same time, other ones who tend to be the, you know, it's that question you make, you're pointing making earlier, it's like who should be responsible for children's safety? Yeah. Should we be outsourcing this to the state and a regulator? Should we be creating this false sense of security? Or is it ultimately, and you know, it's kind of a hard sell to make, because parents feel out of control and understandably so, they don't necessarily feel like they're always in indirect control of, you know, what the kids do in their mind. But also, the only way to ensure kids are safe is through some kind of parental oversight. Things can always go wrong, unless you, again, you have an open conversation with your child. No, it's very basic things.

16:18It's like, if a stranger contacts you online who you don't know, you should probably ignore them. You know, they could be someone who means you half. Maybe they mean no harm. They're probably going to mean you harm. And if they start asking for inappropriate things or saying inappropriate things to you, if somebody from your school contacts you and starts saying mean things to you, you know, you want to tell your parents about that, you know, you want to try to minimize the bullying within within the school kind of atmosphere. There's all sorts of things that's like, there's not a simple technological solution. We're looking for this technical solution. Yeah. And then we're looking for this blame. So it's, we blame social media sites when, of course, the sites themselves are, you know, for the most part, they're not the ones sending you an abusive message. There is an individual sending you an abusive message. Or there is a piece of content that is problematic maybe even illegal. And you want to deal with the people who post the content, particularly if it's illegal. And you want to make sure you have, you know, good systems and processes. And at capable police force and probably resource to be able to deal with actual claims of illegal content, if it's a legal content level, and if it's like, you know, emotionally harmful level, then you want to, you want to deal

17:19with that within a civil society context of trying to address whatever, whatever the problem is that's leading to that harm. And we should say the constitution that again, go back to your point about it being, but it could either be minimalistic or vast. Do you think there is room for more measures that don't go as far as a ban? Well, the lots of the talk and the headlines are about a ban. But actually, do you think there's room for some legislative tweaks so much from the government at all to fix this problem? Or do you think the market is reacting enough? I mean, we've already got this massive online safety framework. I sure want to say, if there's something that you think will make the social media safer for young people, there is already the ability for off-com to put in put forward codes of conduct about how children are treated on social media. And this is the reason why Twitter X started hiding certain social media posts. If you remember that last year, that was because the mechanisms around child safety flipped into, I'm working on this, but you said the child safety duties came into force. There really are kind of extensive child safety that is already the mandate on them, on the social media companies,

18:19to create systems and processes to ensure children are safe. Like, it doesn't seem like, and again, by the way, the child, that stuff's barely been in force for like six months, like all this stuff is pretty new and all these mechanisms are pretty new. We don't know whether the existing stuff is working on it. It's the same principle of the spread. It's the same principle of the online safety act. The governments, you normally come around and legislate on these things, maybe five, 10, 15 years. Like, the technology hasn't moved in the last six months that much. And the existing legislative framework should be able to fix it. Now, the problem is, of course, we're just looking for these magical solutions that don't exist. So, this technical solution doesn't exist. And we're seeing our expectations too high on that front. And the other thing the governments do in the moment is around chatbots, which is also included in this, which is to make chatbots a look like within the online safety framework. Because the online safety framework was meant to be user to user. Obviously, when you're speaking to a chatbot and you're talking to a machine over like a business responsible for the content of the output of the chatbot.

19:20And then, of course, within that is consulting over the not we should ban chatbots from under 16s, which just seems like a totally mad idea. Like, the idea that you don't want something to have access to the most powerful tools to learn, to explore the world, to educate themselves on something that's going to be quite essential. Yes, 50 years, you know, that you're going to cut them off from AI, seems totally mad as a policy. Now, look, I don't know if that's the way the government's going to go, but they're asking a question within that consultation. Yeah, it's totally mental to think that kids graduating secondary school at 16 have suddenly never used a chatbot, which is already an essential part of sort of mulch people's everyday lives and professional setting at least. Yeah, we'll be fundamental to getting on in the economy. If you haven't grown up with that, they're going to be, they should be, after the frontage, growing up with that technology. Instead, we'll go take that a while. I'd be surprised if not, in order with them. Look, I'm not close to social education, but I'm assuming it's already a big part of education. Yeah, sure. It has to be. And look, obviously, again, there are good ways and bad ways to use chatbots. You know, they have been problematic behaviors where people have,

20:21you know, people with, likely, previously mental health issues have been encouraged by chatbot in the conversations they had to do things that are concerning. Whether or not it's like a cause and effect question, I think it's very difficult to unpack. But I think for most kids most of the time, they're probably actually using chatbots and, you know, safe and useful way. And hopefully, an educational way as well. And I just can't say the logic for banning that whatsoever. Not to mention the things like cloud co-worker, cloud code, where you can now vibe code all sorts of applications and learn about the world of software, using these new tools that are, you know, accessible both to the best program in the world and to a 14 year old kid in anywhere in the country. So yeah, I mean, banning kids from AI chatbots seems like a very just important step to take. Well, hopefully a government will note that in their consultation as it goes forth. Well, Matt, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you to you for listening. If you want more from the IA,

21:21don't forget to subscribe to us on subsdac. Not yet banned at insiders.io.uk. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.