Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Debate between Chris Bryant and Josh MacAlister

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant]

I do not want to be a hypocrite; this 63-year-old engages in all those things as well. In fact, it is a shocking shame for me every time I get that notification that says, “You spent on average x number of hours a day on your mobile phone.” I can make justifications—I have to find out what an hon. Member’s seat is, I have to send things back to my private office on WhatsApp and all of those kind of things—but the truth is that if somebody had said to us 40 years ago that they were going to invent something that would make us all, in an addictive way, spend hours and hours and hours looking at a phone rather than engaging with other human beings, we would have said, “Maybe not, eh?”

I was really struck by that when I went to a primary school in Blaengarw in my patch. The headteacher was saying that one of the difficulties is that all the parents waiting to pick up their kids were on their mobile phones outside, as the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett) mentioned earlier. Whatever they did inside the school, the message that every single child got was that life was about being on a mobile phone. As has been said, one of the most important things that a parent can do is engage eye to eye with their children. If they are engaging eye to eye only with their phone, I would argue that that is as much of a problem. I will come on to some of the issues, but I do not want to be hypocritical about it.

I think we all accept that we have to do more. One thing that was not included in the list of things that someone might do if they did not have a mobile phone to spend all their time on was reading a book. I would love more young people to read a book. That longer attention span is one of the things that is an admirable part of being an adult human being.

Several hon. Members referred to the fact that legislation needs to keep up. I will put this very gently to Conservative Members: we argued for an online safety Act for a long time before one ended up becoming legislation. It went through a draft process, and there were lots of rows about what should and should not be in it, and whether we were impinging on freedom of speech and all those kinds of things, but the legislation did not end up on the statute books until the end of 2023. Even then, the Act provided for a fairly slow process of implementation thereafter, partly because Ofcom was taking on powers that, on that day, it simply would not have had enough staff to engage with. The process has been difficult, and I am absolutely certain that the Online Safety Act will not be the end of this story. That is why the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has said clearly that everything is “on the table”, and that is why today’s debate is so important.

Of course, legislation has to be proportionate, balanced, based on evidence—I will come to that in more detail in a moment—and effective. That is why the Online Safety Act will require all platforms that are in scope, including social media platforms, to set up robust systems and processes to tackle the most egregious illegal content or activity proactively, preventing users from encountering it in the first place. Platforms will be required to remove all other illegal content as soon as it is flagged to them.

The Act will also require platforms easily accessed by children—this goes to a point made by several people—to deploy measures to protect children from seeing content that is harmful to them. That includes the use of highly effective age assurance to prevent them from seeing the most harmful types of content, such as that which promotes, encourages or provides instructions for self-harm, suicide or eating disorders. Platforms will also be required to provide age-appropriate access for other types of harmful content, such as bullying, abusive content or content that encourages dangerous stunts or serious violence.

Additionally, under the Act, providers that specify a minimum age limit to access their site must specify how they enforce that in their terms of service and must do so consistently. As many Members have said, this spring will be a key moment in the implementation of the Act, and that is an important point for us to recognise: later this year, things will change, because of the implementation of the Online Safety Act. Ofcom has already set out its draft child safety codes of practice, which are the measures that companies must take to fulfil their duties under the Act.

Ofcom’s draft codes outline that all in-scope services, including social media sites, will be required to tackle algorithms that amplify harm and feed harmful material to children. I would argue that that includes the process of trying to make something addictive for a child. Services will have to configure their algorithms to filter out the most harmful types of content from children’s feeds, and to reduce the visibility and prominence of other harmful content. In January, Ofcom published its guidance for services to implement highly effective age assurance to meet their duties, including the types of technology capable of being highly effective at correctly determining whether a user is a child.

[Josh MacAlister]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, of course. I am about to come to my hon. Friend’s speech, in fact.

[Josh MacAlister]

I and a number of colleagues have had fairly extensive dialogue with Ofcom over the past few months about some of the detailed points, and there are two important gaps in the existing legislation. First, social media companies might put in a minimum age requirement, but there is no power to provide that social media platforms need to have a minimum age requirement to start with, so there is a big gap in the legislation in that respect. Secondly, despite the fairly extensive drafting in the Act, there is no requirement on Ofcom to look at functionality beyond where it relates to harmful content. Ofcom has stated clearly in writing to myself and other Members that it cannot regulate functionality unless it is specifically about harmful content, so much of what has been discussed today would not be covered by Ofcom’s current powers.

[Chris Bryant]

There are four or five different areas where the legislation is not sufficient for the task. Both codes require parliamentary approval, but that process will happen in the next few weeks, with the powers coming into effect this spring. As a Government, we have to decide whether it is better to make that happen now and bed it in, or say that we will have another piece of legislation. I am not allowed to make commitments on behalf of the Government, but I would be absolutely amazed if they did not bring forward further legislation in this field in the next few years. All these issues—and the others that will come along—will definitely need to be addressed, not least because, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe said at the beginning of the debate, we need to make sure that the legislation is up to date.

My hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) talked about the burden of proof, and he is quite right. Of course there should not be a one-way burden of proof. We have to bear in mind two things about proof—perhaps evidence is a better word, because it is not about criminality; it is about evidence-based policy. The first is that, as everybody has said, causation is not correlation. I apologise for the slightly flippant way of putting this, but Marathon became Snickers at the same time as Mrs Thatcher gave way to John Major. I am not aware of any causal relationship between those two events. Many people understand that, but it is often very difficult to weed out what is causation and what is correlation in a specific set of events. For instance, we have all laid out the problems in relation to mental health for children, but only one Member mentioned covid. I would argue that covid is quite a significant player. It was shocking that we strove hard as a Parliament to open pubs again before we opened schools, and that children, who were at the least risk, bore the heaviest burden and that sacrifice on behalf of others. I think we need to factor that in.

The second point is something that I have campaigned on for quite a long time: acquired brain injury. Children from poorer backgrounds are four times more likely to suffer a brain injury under the age of five than kids from wealthier backgrounds, and again in their teenage years. Acquired brain injury in schools is barely recognised. Some schools respond to it remarkably well, but it is likely that there are somewhere between one and three children with a brain injury in every single primary class in this land. Nobody has yet done sufficient work on how much that has contributed to the mental health problems that children have today. We certainly know that the use of phones and screens after brain injury is a significant added factor, but we need to look at all the factors that affect the mental health of children to ensure that we target the specific things that really will work in a combination of policy changes.