Emily Darlington is Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central and a member of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee.
LONDON — I’m a mum. I know a social media ban won’t make my kids safe. It will put them at more risk.
For the last two years I’ve held tech companies to account on the Science, Innovation and Technology select committee. I’ve met with representatives from every big social media platform and challenged them on the features that are putting young people in danger and damaging their mental and physical health to extents we don’t yet understand.
I want kids to be safe online. But I do not believe that an Australia-style outright ban is the solution. If this government implements a simplistic last-ditch effort, I believe it will backfire once parents see this policy for what it is: A cop-out from making difficult but necessary changes that will actually work.
Three quarters of Australian teens are already back on social media since the “ban.” They’re either on it without their parents’ knowledge, taking away one of the strongest protections kids have against predators, their parents; or they’re on smaller, more dangerous platforms that aren’t big enough to come within the scope of a ban.
That list includes Tattle.Life, the gossip website that has claimed several lives; Telegram, where communications can’t be traced, or the so-called Incel Forum, where a post mentioning rape is added every 29 minutes, and nine out of 10 posters in those discussions support sexual violence against women. Australia’s model excluded all of these platforms alongside gaming platforms like Roblox, which are social by design and allow strangers to talk directly to kids with no guardrails.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram need to be regulated to be safe for kids — but I know how to use them, and so can talk to my kids about how to stay safe on them and I can supervise their use if I feel I need to. But if they are banned, I won’t know what kinds of websites and forums their schoolmates join and could encourage them to join as well. And neither will the government, at least not before a terrible headline appears that sheds a light on what our kids are doing in the dark corners of the internet now that we’ve banned them from the spaces we can see.
A ban does nothing to stop new platforms cropping up quicker than government can identify them, let alone legislate against them. A platform-based ban risks creating a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, where we chase yesterday’s technology while today’s alternatives are left to flourish unchecked.
The problem is not social media platforms themselves. It’s the features and business models that make them unsafe for children and young people.
An age ban lets social media platforms off the hook far too easily. They’ve been left unregulated for far too long, making money off exploitative and dangerous features that put all users at risk. What makes a 17-year-old girl less vulnerable to grooming by a stranger than a 15-year-old? Shouldn’t we ban the ability of strangers to contact young people, instead of allowing them to prey on newly turned 16-year-olds who have no experience spotting their tactics?
These are the kinds of specific functionalities we must focus on if we want social media ever to be a safe place for anyone, including young people. Endless algorithmic feeds designed to keep you online for hours, AI chatbots that encourage suicide and self-harm, direct messaging from strangers, and recommendation engines that rapidly push harmful content — these are the real issues.
A platform may disappear, but these features can and will simply reappear elsewhere. Teens will be moved onto the kinds of niche web forums that have historically been the home of the most extreme harmful content. They will use new, untested platforms in secret, exposed to the sorts of exploitation and predatory behaviour that is already banned on mainstream social media platforms. And more worryingly, if using social media is a prohibited activity, a young person who is being cyberbullied, blackmailed, harassed, or stalked online will be even more reluctant than they already are to tell a parent or teacher, for fear of getting into trouble themselves.
If this does happen — and the evidence from Australia shows it will — what will this government say to the parents it promised that a ban would protect their kids? When the headlines prove we were wrong, what leverage will we have over social media accounts whose business models have already changed to exclude young people, to ask them to please make it safe for them to come back online?
The choice is not between doing nothing or banning social media altogether. It’s between regulating brands and regulating harms. One approach will leave legislators perpetually playing catch-up. The other has a chance of making the internet genuinely safer for children. Banning platforms may generate headlines, but making platforms safe would actually solve the problem.