Control tech oligarchs before banning under 16s from social media - Andy Brown

I am old enough to remember the moral panic which went through the nation when televisions first became commonplace in every home. There were serious debates about what damage it would do to childhood if too much time was spent watching the gogglebox.

Go back a bit further and you’ll find that there was even a similar outcry when young people started reading books other than the bible. It is normal for the older generation to become very concerned about younger people doing things that they weren’t able to do themselves regardless of whether those things are good or bad.

There are, of course, plenty of appalling things going on in social media and no shortage of evidence of children who have had their lives ruined or even ended because of horrible messages and videos being beamed into their homes from deeply untrustworthy sources.

There is some seriously warped stuff out there. Suicide encouragement. Bullying that pursues the victim into their own private bedroom and gives not a moment of rest. Vicious lies about what women really want that encourage violence and dangerous ideas about sex. Elon Musk pumping out racist propaganda and outright lies about life in Britain.

Exposing young people to the full force of manipulation, dangerous untruths, attempts to obtain money via blackmail or fake love offers, encouragement to terrorist violence, or political extremist propaganda is not something any sensible person wants to see.

Yet there are positive aspects to owning an intelligent phone that shouldn’t be dismissed lightly and serious questions need to be asked about whether the right approach is to ban young people from ever having access to those benefits or whether we should be controlling better the ultra-rich oligarchs who decide what is allowed on these platforms.

Denying a child access to simple family updates about what time things are happening or who is taking a child swimming is too heavy handed. Almost any chat group that makes that possible will also be vulnerable to exploitation but it is the producers of vicious content that need controlling not responsible users of helpful applications.

Educationally the ability to search the entire net to find information is an incredible boon and ought to be celebrated not denied. OK we don’t want children writing all their essays by asking AI to do their homework and there is a real need to ensure there is a physical exam with proper identity checks often enough to discover cheating and ensure results are fair. Most kids know very well that ultimately they need to learn things for themselves and have a good understanding of how to integrate AI with their studies.

Learning online skills on a phone is no bad thing if it prepares our children for an outside world that is going to increasingly consist of mixtures of genuine human creativity and machine learned pastiches of what has already been most commonly created. Particularly as that machine learning isn’t factually accurate and simply replicates racism and bad attitudes towards women unless very carefully designed.

What we don’t want our kids to have to do is to cope with a daily barrage of utterly untrustworthy content that contains few protections. We need to work much harder on preventing the oligarchs from drip feeding pornography or manipulating elections before we resort to outright bans on applications enjoyed by people below a certain age.

If young people have little exposure to nasty content before they are 16 and then suddenly get the full force of it, that is unlikely to be of real benefit. If we properly control the flow of information so that it follows rules we previously applied to printed text, then to the radio and subsequently to television content we stand a chance.

The oligarchs scream about free speech the second anyone proposes controlling their power. We need to be very careful about assuming it is freedom when someone with several billion dollars gets to flood screens with the idea that democracy, the welfare state or the NHS needs to be swept away and be replaced by what is in their own best interest and will save them on their tax bill.

The people that the government should control much more carefully are the producers and distributors of dubious content instead of placing the burden of control onto consumers of whatever age. The power of platform owners needs limiting so we can let kids make their own decisions safely.

Sensible controls over not using phones in school and wise parental restrictions are clearly necessary. Draconian government controls would be better directed at powerful owners of software licenses instead of on the enjoyment of technology by the young.

Andy Brown is the Green Party Councillor for Aire Valley.