Smartphones and Social Media: Children

Debate between Miriam Cates and Caroline Ansell

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Miriam Cates]

I deeply thank my hon. Friend and I will come later in my speech to some of the improvements that he himself made to the Online Safety Bill.

As well as being more susceptible to visual social comparison, girls are more susceptible to sociogenic transmission or what we might call social contagion, which explains the acute impact of trans ideology on girls. We have seen a 5,000% rise in referrals of girls to gender clinics. Girls are also, of course, more subject to sexual predation and harassment, with younger and younger girls being coaxed or threatened into sending intimate images and even filming their own sexual abuse. In 2022 the Internet Watch Foundation found 141,000 child sexual abuse images of 11 to 13-year-olds, the vast majority of which were self-generated. The front-facing smartphone camera provides the world with an open door to our little girls in their bedrooms.

Boys are less affected by visual and social comparison, but where social media destroys the self-confidence of teenage girls, gaming and porn rewire the brains of adolescent boys. Having 24-hour access to pornography superficially satisfies the sexual desires of young men, but it leaves them isolated, lacking in relationship skills and, tragically, searching for more and more extreme material to become aroused. The average age for encountering online pornography, much of which is violent, degrading and deeply disturbing, is 13 years old, just when boys are forming their expectations about sex. Nearly half of young people now believe that girls expect sex to involve violence.

Multiplayer video games hack into boys’ competitiveness and physical aggression. Again, the games superficially fulfil natural male desires, but they leave boys lonely, withdrawn from the real world, lacking in real skills and unable to find enjoyment or stimulation away from the screen. For boys and girls, time spent on social media represents an enormous opportunity cost. Hours of doomscrolling are hours not spent gaining physical and relational experiences that will equip them with the resilience they need for real life. We have substituted a phone-based childhood for a play-based childhood with tragic consequences.

Even our schools do not provide a safe haven. Recent research by Policy Exchange found that only 11% of secondary schools have an effective phone ban, with the overwhelming majority of children still able to access their devices at school. Interestingly, the schools that had implemented an effective ban were significantly more likely to be rated outstanding by Ofsted and achieved on average one or two grades higher at GCSE, despite being more typically in deprived areas.

Forty-three per cent of older teenagers say social media has distracted them from school work enough to impact their grades. One child told a Parentkind survey:

“I can't focus on my school homework because every 5 minutes I get distracted and go back onto my phone. Occasionally, I’ll see triggering content on social media such as suicide or gory images.”

Social media offers constant, instant gratification, with a dopamine hit and a new distraction every few seconds. Is it any wonder that children are less and less able to concentrate and focus on the intellectually demanding task of academic learning? For the first time ever, IQ is falling across the western world. Programme for international student assessment data shows that maths, reading and science scores have all declined since 2014.

Some question the causal relationship between social media and smartphones and the decline in adolescent wellbeing. Many blame the financial crash in 2008. But why would those trends affect only the under-25s? Some blame the UK Conservative Government, but how can localised economic, political or social conditions account for the collapse in childhood wellbeing across the western world all at the same time?

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important and timely debate and on the excellent speech that she is making. She talks about the scorching number of hours that children and young people are online and the very high percentage who engage in the virtual world rather than the physical world. But there is one group of children who are shielded or protected from the influences that she describes: the children of tech moguls and those who work in the industry. Does she think that that is very telling and, in equal measure, absolutely damning?

[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.