Smartphones and Social Media: Children

Debate between Eddie Hughes and Miriam Cates

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Miriam Cates]

My hon. Friend is right. It is hugely significant that those who really know how these apps and algorithms work firmly believe that they are not safe for children. When asked if the iPad was addictive, Steve Jobs famously remarked that he assumed so because he had designed it to be so.

On the causal links between social media and smartphones and the decline in childhood wellbeing, Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge present compelling causative evidence of the harms of social media. On his Substack, Haidt describes six experiments that found that when social life moves rapidly online, mental health declines, especially for girls. Not one study failed to find a harmful effect. It is now impossible to deny the devastating impact that smartphones and social media have on our children. Some say that it is a parenting problem and that parents need to pay more attention to their children’s phone use. But in a survey of older teenagers, half said they had found ways to bypass parental controls.

It is not just screen time that is so difficult for parents or children to manage; it is all but impossible to control the content to which children are exposed. As whistleblowers Arturo Béjar and Frances Haugen have testified, social media companies knowingly use algorithms to feed children harmful and addictive content.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate and bringing us together to discuss this important topic. Going back to the problems that parents have, if their child is the only kid in the class who does not have a smartphone, the parent will suffer the peer pressure we are trying to protect children from. Does she see a way round that?

[Miriam Cates]

My hon. Friend is right. There is a problem of collective action: the costs of being the only child or the only parent without that phone are too high—far too high for ordinary parents to resist. I will come to what I see as some of the solutions later, but he is absolutely right to highlight that issue.

Even if the material being viewed is benign, smartphones and social media are highly addictive and provide a constant off-ramp to our mental focus and erode our concentration. I wonder how many hon. Members in the past 11 minutes have thought about or looked at their phone; I certainly have. As I said, when Steve Jobs was asked in 2011 if the iPad might be addictive, he remarked that he had designed it to be so.

We know as adults how difficult it is to control our own phone use, but the average child gets 237 notifications a day. That is a concentration-busting, addiction-fuelling dopamine hit every four seconds of waking time. If there were no laws against the sale of tobacco, drugs or alcohol to children, we would not expect parents to be able to defend their children from the might of big pharma or big tobacco, yet somehow we do expect ordinary parents to be able to protect their children from the vested interests of the likes of Meta, TikTok, X and Apple, the wealthiest and most powerful countries—sorry, companies—the world has ever seen. In fact, they are more powerful than most countries. Apple has $3 trillion in the bank, which is as much as our GDP, so they are more powerful than many countries.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) remarked, parents could refuse to give their child a smartphone, but the fact that 97% of teens and half of nine-year-olds have one gives an indication of the extreme pressure and social isolation experienced by the only child in a school or class without a phone. We surely cannot believe that 97% of parents are bad parents.