Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan]

The hon. Lady makes a common-sense point: if we are going to advocate for change, we have to lead by example. It might be said that the harms we are talking about are a somewhat separate issue to that. Of course we need to take responsibility, but where we have social media companies that are pushing content that is objectively dangerous, we need to have the conversation that we are having today about how the system and social media companies should be forced to ensure that that space is a safe one.

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

I thank the parents who have brought forward this petition—they are often way ahead of us as legislators when it comes to issues affecting children’s safety. My hon. and learned Friend is doing a very good job of setting out some possible risks that the Online Safety Act will not fully be able to mitigate some of the challenges that we are seeing. Considering robust measures on the age of access to social media is timely and important in thinking about the best way of protecting young people from possible exposure to online harm. On top of that, though, we must recognise that some exposure is always likely to be there. Would he also agree that it is important to ensure that we think how, through the curriculum review, we can best empower and set up children, young people and their parents to protect themselves from harm where they are exposed to it, even with the stronger regulations that we are looking to put in place?

[Tony Vaughan]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We will not protect children through just Government or social media while expecting parents to do nothing. Of course, we parents will have to do our part. Interestingly, on that point, I was going to say that an important potential measure is the approach put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) in his private Member’s Bill, the Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill. His concept, which I hope to hear more about in the course of this debate, is about raising the age of data consent from 13 to 16, which essentially stops the social media companies being able to harvest data and keep feeding the kind of content that will be harmful. That seems to me a no-brainer.

Very briefly, I want to talk about smartphones in school, an issue closely connected to the one posed by the petitioner. Many teachers and parents who I have talked to believe that this “never seen, never heard” guidance, which was introduced by the previous Government, is not working. We have students still using phones during break time and often during lessons, and the problems that that causes are significant. I have had many teachers say to me, “This takes up so much time—it is a huge distraction and it interferes with learning.”