Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Naushabah Khan Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan (Folkestone and Hythe) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 700086 relating to a minimum age for social media.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. The House is considering whether social media should be banned for children under the age of 16. I start by thanking Kim Campbell, who is in the Public Gallery, for submitting this petition, which has gained over 130,000 signatures. Kim believes that the answer to the question posed is yes. When I asked my two boys, aged 14 and 10, whether social media should be banned for children, their answer was predictable: [Hon. Members: “No!”] No—of course. But when we ask the same question of UK adults, the overwhelming majority respond: [Hon. Members: “Yes.”] Yes—75% of them, in fact, according to a poll published last month and based on a survey of 2,000 adults, I think. On the same theme, I asked my constituents in Folkestone and Hythe last week whether smartphones should be banned in schools. Almost 2,000 responded and, again, 75% thought that they should—I must say that many of the 24% who thought that they should not looked to me as though they were still at school themselves.

Are adults imagining a problem here? Do we just not understand our young people? I have heard it said more than once that most adults do not see how important social media is to young people’s social and digital identity and that we cannot teach boundaries if we ban access to these apps altogether. I totally agree that social media can be a space where young people can build positive relationships with their peers, reduce loneliness, improve coping skills and improve general knowledge and creativity—social media can of course be a wonderful tool, but it is currently a wild west where there is too much harmful content.

[Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree, given where we are with social media today, that legislation just has not kept up with the pace of change? We are far behind in being able to deal with and tackle this issue, given how extensive social media usage is. Our pace of change, in terms of legislation, just has not met that demand.

[Tony Vaughan]

My hon. Friend raises an interesting point. The legislative regime that we have at the moment, as I will come on to say, will require risk assessments. The state of the evidence when the Online Safety Act 2023 was being passed is different from the evidence that we have today, so the nature of those assessments and of the risks is necessarily different. As I will come on to say, we need to look at that on a continual basis.

As I was saying, social media can be a wonderful tool, but it has become a wild west where too much harmful content is being pushed on to young people, and social media companies are simply not doing enough to tackle it. The sad fact of the matter is that social media is pushing content that radicalises, that catalyses mental health crises and that is highly addictive. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, last month raised the alarm about how extremist ideologies are reaching children as young as 12 through social media platforms, and young people radicalised by social media are on its books. That, of course, is a growing threat to national security.

Another issue is mental health crises. We are seeing skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and even suicide among adolescents.

--- Later in debate ---

[Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in this debate, because the safety of young people online is possibly one of the most pressing challenges of our time.

I have a confession to make: I hate social media, but I feel compelled to use it. It cannot be denied that social media is an inescapable reality of modern life. For young people, it plays a role in how they interact with the world, form their identities and access information. I do not for a second dispute that social media is a tool of extraordinary power for connection, education and creativity, but it has increasingly become a space where harm is done that is profound, persistent and deeply damaging. Legislative change has not kept up with the pace of social media growth. As a society, we are playing catch-up to the impact of social media, and we are not doing it fast enough.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) detailed, the evidence base that surrounds this is much debated, but something we can all agree on is that numerous studies have exposed declining mental health in adolescents and rising cases of anxiety, depression and self-harm. Algorithms are designed to drive engagement on platforms. They do not prioritise wellbeing. Instead, they prioritise views, clicks and the user’s attention. It is easy to see how our children become passive observers of extreme content and harmful trends when harmful material does not need to be sought out but is instead delivered to their phones.

Unfortunately, it does not just stop at exposure to harmful content. The dangerous reality of the online world is that it has become a hunting ground for those who seek to manipulate and exploit others. We have seen the rise of online grooming facilitated by the anonymity of fake profiles. We are in a situation where children are being targeted in their own homes through their own devices by individuals who have never had easier access to them. I understand why parents are worried. Since being elected I have received numerous representations from concerned parents in Gillingham and Rainham who just want their children to exist and go through life free from harm. I appreciate that everybody wants that, but they perceive the risk to their children now extends into sanctuary of their own home. They see no pause, no protection and no escape.

While I support a review of the minimum age for social media access—there is certainly a need to look at it in closer detail—I do not think that will be a quick fix that solves the issues we face at this point. I encourage everyone here to go and speak to an average 15-year-old—clearly, some hon. Members have already done so, as their speeches today show. One finds very quickly that they are extremely capable of being inventive and circumventing the rules. That is what teenagers have done since time immemorial. The fundamental problem is that these platforms were never designed with the safety of children in mind. We would be doing our children a disservice by raising a legal barrier and simply hoping that the risk disappears, because that is not what will happen. Children deserve more. They deserve more responsibility from social media companies, more urgency from regulators and perhaps more action from us, the Members elected to this House.

The Online Safety Act was a huge step in the right direction under the previous Government, but we must ensure that the protections are not diluted to the point where obligations are placed on platforms only where they are seen to be the least burdensome. Harm reduction for our children must remain the fundamental priority. I welcome this Government’s commitment to working with Ofcom to effectively implement the 2023 Act so that children benefit from the protections as soon as possible, but clearly the legislation alone will not be enough. We have heard powerful speeches about cultural change. Implementation must also be done at speed and with determination. Ofcom is now armed with new regulatory powers and must move at pace to protect our children from the harms that colleagues across the House have spoken about time and again. We have to get this right.

My constituents in Gillingham and Rainham are particularly interested in ensuring that implementation of measures such as user identity verification are sped up, so that adults and children alike can benefit from the protections. We need to send out a clear signal that delays will not be tolerated and that platforms need to be held to account. Various platforms do that to different degrees, and some are much better than others, but all still have a long way to go. Online safety should be not a distant ambition, but acknowledged to be an immediate necessity, because every day that action is delayed, another young person is exposed to harm, and we have to prevent that.

I end by thanking my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for introducing this debate. It is incredibly important that we continue this conversation. I also thank the Minister for his time and for listening to the powerful representations that have been made today.