Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Patrick Hurley Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Patrick Hurley (Southport) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I will set out some facts and figures before moving on to the substance of my speech. Seventy-one per cent of children report having experienced harm online. Twenty-one per cent of children report having been contacted online by adults they do not know. Vulnerable children are twice as likely as their peers to encounter online bullying. Fifty-seven per cent of parents report that their children’s sleep patterns are being negatively affected by online activity. And here is the killer stat: despite the age limit of 13, 85% of 9 to 12-year-olds are reported to use social media. It is obvious that a mere increase in the threshold to 16 years of age is insufficient; the measure needs to go hand in hand with enforcement.

Many Members in this debate have, rightly, concentrated on the harms to children. My hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) somewhat stole my thunder by so eloquently drawing an analogy with smoking in the 1950s. I have truncated my speech accordingly, but the analogy is accurate: we are now at the stage where social media usage is analogous to smoking in the 1950s. Obvious harm is being done, but we are not yet at a stage where we can accurately quantify it, categorise it or come to a settled conclusion on how to deal with it.

Evidence continues to emerge around harmful content, disrupted sleep patterns, damage to the mental health of children, addictiveness and more, but we as a society, a Government, a Parliament and politicians do not yet know how to adequately deal with all of that. As a starting point, I support an increase in age restrictions, in line with the petition, but we need to learn more about the causes of the problems affecting our younger generations and find out how to prevent them for future generations. In addition to an increase in the age limit, I want stronger enforcement of age limits by Ofcom and through self-regulation by social media companies. We also need more high-quality, robust research to prove causality beyond any doubt.

I finish with an aspect that has not been touched on in the debate. Last week in the House, I noted how there is increasingly a political element, where social media companies reflect the national interests of the host countries in which they are situated. There are national interest considerations for the UK in regulation of social media. We do not want foreign agents and foreign actors to influence our democratic process in relation to adults and we certainly do not want them to influence the formation of the politics of our children.

Children’s Social Media Accounts

Patrick Hurley Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Joani Reid (East Kilbride and Strathaven) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I pay tribute to Ellen Roome in the most genuine and heartfelt way for what she has achieved and what she does. The pain she has been through is utterly unimaginable. What we can do today, as I hope the Minister’s response will, is make her bravery worth while.

I will focus my brief remarks on the Online Safety Act 2023, because so many of our hopes as parents, campaigners and elected representatives were pinned on that legislation. It is a step forward, but only a first step. I believe that more should be done. The Act was the product of a weak Conservative Government, with many Ministers and Back Benchers who shared the then Opposition’s conviction that strong regulation of social media companies was essential but were being held to ransom by extreme libertarians who had dressed up their ability to monetise hatred and extreme content as a free speech issue. Government Ministers gave in to an alliance of social media companies that were not willing to dilute profits to spend on effective moderation and that had a financial and political interest in driving engagement with extreme content. That was a deplorable outcome, as many hon. Members said at the time.

Plainly, as a first task, the new Government must make that legislation work as best they can. I understand why my right hon. and hon. Friends are pressing on with implementing it as best as they can. However, my request to them is to heed the petition and recognise that what was good enough for the then Government under those circumstances cannot be good enough for this new Government in the medium and long term. It is certainly not good enough for our children.

The immediate concern for me, for the people I speak to at the school gates and for many of my hon. Friends is that the proposed regulatory regime will let some of the most dangerous and extreme websites escape the proper regulation that the vast majority of people in this country expect them to receive. It cannot be right that we allow some sites to escape accountability for their failure to remove certain promotional material speedily simply because they are small. Of course they are small—such content is so vile that the chances of the promoters getting bigger audiences will always be limited—but the need for the firmest regulation in these cases is driven by content, not by size.

[Patrick Hurley (Southport) (Lab)]

The failure of Ofcom to regulate the small but risky platforms seems to mean that a site such as LinkedIn is being regulated to a greater extent than platforms such as Telegram or Discord, which are overrun with far-right activism, self-harm, misinformation, homophobia and antisemitic content. Does my hon. Friend agree that that needs to be rectified and that Ofcom needs to raise its game?

[Joani Reid]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I believe that more needs to be done. I do not believe that the Government have ruled that out: they are collecting evidence, so I believe that in future iterations of the code, if that argument is accepted by Ofcom, they will make the appropriate changes. It is up to us to continue to submit the evidence and to call for those changes to be made.

The main point in the debate is about the balance between regulation and innovation and about where we draw the line between the obligations of site users and those of content providers, so that we do not discourage new services and investment. However, I believe that that is not the issue that the petition we are debating addresses. Hatred and the data to which we are calling for access are not drivers of economic growth. Nor is the inclusion of high-harm sites in category 1 a barrier to investment plans for the frontline market leaders. This is about doing the right thing. I hope that all the voices will be heard today.