Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Joe Powell Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Josh MacAlister (Whitehaven and Workington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. The debate so far has done a really good job of summarising lots of the reasons why I chose to bring forward a private Member’s Bill earlier last year to address some of the issues relating to the addictive features of smartphones and social media, such as the impacts on sleep, mental health and educational attainment. There are also increasing concerns about conspiracy theories and their ability to spread, particularly among young children.

Today, I will focus specifically on the evidence, because I think that that is where the political debate is moving and where there seems to be the greatest disagreement—particularly on whether we have enough evidence now to act with confidence or whether we should pause and wait for further evidence.

There are three ways I think about this issue. The first is that, in 2012, something happened not just here, but around the western world and beyond, and it was specifically to do with teenage mental health and levels of anxiety and depression among our young people. That global event coincided with the rise in access to smartphones and social media and high-speed internet. There is no other plausible hypothesis that I have heard or come across—I would welcome interventions from colleagues here today—to explain that global phenomenon; there is no coherent alternative hypothesis. So when we think about the evidence that we require to act in this country, we should think carefully about whether we are looking at developed, different hypotheses for why this problem has grown.

The second element is the precautionary principle, which links to another point that was made. The tech industry in particular is very effective at casting doubt over findings from studies. Over the years, the burden of proof and of evidence has fallen on those like the many Members present and the petitioners. It has been for them to establish beyond reasonable doubt that there is a causal link between the use of smartphones and social media and the harms that it may cause. It is important in this debate, and in others, to balance where that evidence should be brought from. Surely we should place a burden of proof on those rolling out technology and platforms that are gobbling up huge amounts of children’s and young people’s time. At a fairly conservative estimate, the average 12-year-old is spending the equivalent of a part-time job every week on their smartphone. That must have some effect on how they might otherwise have used their time, the development of their brains, and their relationships with other people while they are on those platforms.

[Joe Powell (Kensington and Bayswater) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for his private Member’s Bill, which I wholeheartedly support. On the subject of evidence, pilots are increasingly being undertaken, such as the one in the “Swiped” documentary that was referenced earlier. I met 70 parents at All Saints Catholic college in my constituency two weeks ago to discuss this topic, and they have seen, from the school’s own evidence base, the impact of a much stricter smartphone policy. We are starting to see both the evidence of the harms, as my hon. Friend talked about, and interesting pilots that show the improvements that could be achieved by measures such as the internet age of consent and a stronger policy in schools.

[Josh MacAlister]

I thank my hon. Friend for his work on this issue in his constituency. He is absolutely right. Micro-experiments and anecdotal feedback from members of the public, who have signed this petition in large numbers, show that parents are really worried that something is going on here, but it will take some time to gather the evidence. The second aspect is about where the burden of proof should lie. Applying the burden of proof in one direction only—to those advocating for tighter regulation—is not balanced. It should apply both ways.

The third point about evidence relates to the absence of causal studies. They will take many years, so what do we do, in their absence, with the weight of correlational evidence before us? This is where we must look at the work of Sir Austin Bradford Hill. The Bradford Hill criteria, which were named after him in the 1960s, were based on the epidemiologist’s work to try to fill in the evidence gap for policymakers when the debate was being had about the public health impacts of smoking. The tobacco industry did a very effective job of casting doubt over whether smoking itself caused cancer or, as the industry then said, it simply brought cancer out earlier—that cancer was inherent within people. That was the argument: the industry said that there was no correlational study to prove that that was not the case, which goes back to my burden of proof argument.

We need to fill in the gap, because we will not have causal studies for many years. Petitions like this will continue to come, the debate will carry on raging, and politicians will be pulled towards this problem until we find a way of solving it. In the absence of those correlational studies, we have to find a way of applying a framework to look at the existing causal studies. I will not go through all nine of the Bradford Hill criteria, but one of them is dose-response rate: does the dose of a certain factor relate to the degree of the impact? In 2019, the UK millennium cohort study found that

“social media use is associated with mental health in young people”,

and greater use means greater impact. A 2022 dose-response meta-analysis found that more time spent on social media was “significantly associated” with depression. There are stacks of studies out there that show the correlation between time spent and impact. When one works through the nine criteria, in the absence of a causal study or series of causal studies, the evidence points in a clear direction: we need tighter regulation that can empower parents to set boundaries and the collective rules for how our children use smartphones and social media.

There is a risk, at times, that the sides to this debate are characterised as pro- or anti-tech. My final reflection is that, for the UK to be the global sandbox and incubator of great tech development that it should be, we need good, intuitive shared rules that can garner high degrees of public consent and support. If we move quickly on this issue, and do it smart, as a country, we will get benefits not only for economic growth and the tech industry, but for our children and their future.