The US Embassy proselytising against the social media ban shows Americans don’t understand irony - David Behrens

Are we really going to take a lecture from America on freedom of expression? From a country that at this moment is refusing entry to World Cup fans who have tweeted unpleasant truths about the President? From a nation in which armed ‘enforcement officers’ shoot first and ask questions later? From an administration that seeks to cancel TV hosts it doesn’t like?

It has long been said that Americans don’t understand irony. The Embassy put it beyond doubt.

Its warning about the burden on tech companies was no less tone deaf. Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, made £34bn last year and it did so by deliberately and faithlessly exploiting its users. When harm inevitably came their way it shrugged its corporate shoulders. It believes that having unfiltered access to all of us is its inviolable right and that the Trump administration is its personal enforcement tool.

Some say that in imposing an outright ban our own Government has acted too fast. And it’s true, the last two years have been defined by hurried announcements – not least on farm taxes and pensioners’ allowances – which had to be U-turned when everything hit the fan. But this feels different. It feels right.

MPs could have chosen to outlaw only the most addictive and insidious features of Facebook and the like. But the effect would have been to set off a futile game of whack-a-mole with the tech companies. For every function they removed, two new ones would have popped up, even more deleterious than before. No, the solution is to recognise social media obsession among the young as a cancer in society and to extract it at source. That means taking away the audience in which it spreads.

And, bluntly, what even are the uses of Facebook, Instagram and Elon Musk’s hate-filled X to under-16s other than amusement and distraction? The benefits are far outweighed by the harms – and I don’t mean hypothetical risks; I mean quantifiable psychological damage perpetrated for the pursuit of profit. Freedom of speech has been interpreted as a licence to corrupt.

The counter-arguments from the tech companies betray the delusional beliefs on which their platforms were founded. Facebook’s creator Mark Zuckerberg once said he was on a mission to “connect the world”, as if he had a divine right to do so. It turned out that ‘connecting’ meant putting everyone on the planet directly in harm’s way. Thanks to him, every fraudster, every agitator, every sex offender now has direct access to everyone else.

Facebook’s response to the UK ban was to warn that young people might now be driven to “unregulated alternatives” – you know, books or music or, heaven forbid, actual human interaction. It failed to acknowledge that had it regulated its own platform effectively the problem would never have arisen.

It also spoke of the “risk” of isolating teens from “online communities”, romanticising as midwestern idylls of fellowship what are in fact poisonous and semi-literate diatribes which they dangle in front of impressionable young eyes with the purpose of inflaming them.

Ramping up the rhetoric instead of acknowledging legitimate concerns and setting out reforms demonstrates the continuing determination of tech companies to impose their own misguided social codes, irrespective of the consequences. Reining them in was inevitable.

Facebook is right in one respect: some teens will circumvent the ban by cloaking their age and identity behind a Virtual Private Network – the computer equivalent of getting your older brother to buy you a pint. But most will follow the herd. That’s how they got hooked on social media in the first place and it’s how the next generation will avoid it.

And what of the rest of us? When the US Embassy spoke of keeping “political speech” accessible, it was articulating a uniquely Trumpian hypocrisy: the freedom to inflame and incite so long as he agrees with you. It is a travesty in which technology – Musk’s X in particular – has been weaponised against society. And that, as Wes Streeting intimated this week, is the next danger we will have to outlaw.