Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Siân Berry Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I thank Kim Campbell and the petitioners, including almost 400 from East Hampshire, for bringing this debate to Parliament. There has been a lot of interest of late in Australia’s upcoming ban on social media for under-16s, and I was interested in how the Australians are going to implement it, considering some of the complexities and definitional difficulties. I recommend to colleagues a very good interview on American National Public Radio with Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, in which she said that it is not about flicking some big switch. She said that there was a possibility that some social media functionality could be removed, rather than an entire app being blocked; that

“messaging and gaming sites and anything that delivers education or health care information”

would be exempt; and that, ultimately, it would be for the Minister for Communications to

“decide which platforms are in and which are out.”

Well, I hope they have invested in their legal defence budgets.

It is true that parents vary widely in what they think is good or acceptable. Everybody agrees that their child should be able to call or text home to let mum or dad know that they are delayed or feeling worried, or that their club has been cancelled. Some also value things that can be done only on a smartphone—such as using a map to find the way home—and there is a whole other debate about education technology and the use of Show My Homework and all the rest of it. Some parents are totally happy with the entirety of the electronic world—smartphones and social media. Let us be honest: it is parents who often help children get around the minimum age limit to be on these platforms. Sometimes, we say that they do that only for fear of the child missing out, and that may be true, but we do not know that it is in the majority of cases.

In addressing these questions as legislators, we often fall back on saying, “Hang on, we’re not talking about banning all phones; we’re talking specifically about smartphones. And we’re not talking about getting rid of the good stuff; we’re only talking about getting rid of the bad stuff.” This, of course, is the easy stage in the legislative process, and things become much harder later, when we have to define precisely what we mean. I am about to recommit that sin: I am going to talk about an ill-defined “it” that we may in some way want to restrict. That “it” is something about smartphones and social media that I will today fail to define, but I hope to come back at the end to say a little about more precisely what I mean.

I am not in the business of trying to put new restrictions on how parents manage their families or of trying to do things to them that they could do for themselves. There is already a minimum age for using social media; it just happens to be an arbitrary age that is based on some legislation—not even from this country—from the 1990s. When the GDPR came in through the European Union, which we were in then, countries could choose an age anywhere between 13 and 16. Different countries chose different ages; we happen to have settled on 13. Most people would say that we have to set the bar somewhere, so the question becomes, where? Of course, we could, alternatively, say that the Government or a regulator have no role in setting an age at all. However, if that is not our view, and we accept that there should be an age, we have to ask the secondary question: what should it be? There is no ancient right to be on TikTok at age 13. These are novel technologies, and we are facing these questions now for the first time.

In this country, there are two main thresholds for the transition from childhood to adulthood, and they are 16 and 18. Those are not the only ones, but they are the main ones. In English law, there has never been a concept of an age of digital consent and nor, to my knowledge, was there a non-digital concept of consent in contract law previously for somebody under the age of majority. I grant that it is arguable, but it seems that 16 is the most appropriate threshold.

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I have met parents from Smartphone Free Childhood, but also young people. This is a big issue in Brighton Pavilion. Has the right hon. Member thought about pushing for the Minister and Members to talk more with young people about where the age limit should lie, rather than trying to come up with a number in the middle of a debate? It is clear from talking to young people that they feel that parts of social media are very toxic, but I also think they are best placed to judge where the limit should lie.

[Damian Hinds]

To be fair to the Minister and previous Ministers, I think they do make efforts to hear from young people. An interesting survey by the Youth Endowment Fund, which I commend to the hon. Lady and others, put an extreme proposition to 13 to 17-year-olds: “If you could turn off social media forever for you and everybody else, would you do it?” While a majority did not say yes to that extreme proposition, something like a third did. We also have various other surveys.

It is true that when we talk to children, as I am sure many colleagues have done in schools across their constituencies, we get a variety of views. In particular, children do not want to be left out, and as parents we do not want that for our children either. If everybody else is in a certain group or has a certain means of communication, we tend to want our children to have that too.

The evidence is not perfect. There is even evidence that some screen time is a positive good. A programme for international student assessment study in 2019 talked about a Goldilocks effect, where about an hour of screen time was beneficial for mental wellbeing, after which the benefit declined. That same study found wide differences in life satisfaction between what it called “extreme internet users” and others. There are now plenty of other studies on everything from happiness, the quality of relationships and eyesight to the effect on sleep and concentration.

There is also the rising incidence of mental ill health among teenagers, which—for the avoidance of doubt and to take politics out of it—is not unique to this country and not uniquely a post-covid effect. Causality is still hard to prove, but it seems extraordinary that, when we are talking about children, we allow something to happen because we cannot prove 100% that it causes harm, rather than allowing it to happen only if we can prove that it is safe. That is not the way we deal, for example, with children’s food or toys. I would turn the question around: are people really suggesting that the prevalence of self-harm is nothing to do with the prevalence and normalisation of certain imagery on social media?

The Online Safety Act was a landmark piece of legislation, and we will debate it again in Westminster Hall on Wednesday. Everybody who worked on it— including myself—was always clear that it would not be the last time we had to come back to this subject in legislation. It is inevitable that there will be further regulation and restrictions in the interests of greater child protection. I therefore urge the Government to move from working out whether there will be further protections to working out what those will be. Of course, to write legislation—to return to where I started—one needs to be able to define things precisely and, in reality, there is no bright line between a smartphone and a brick phone, and no slam-dunk definition of social media either.

It can be instructive to think about individual platforms and services. One of the things we worry about is TikTok. Do we worry about Snapchat? Yes, we probably do, because of the association with bullying and the disappearing messages. But some families like the snap friends function, because they can see where different family members are. Do we worry about Instagram? Yes, we probably do, and it has a particular association with issues around body image. But it is also a way for people to share lovely family photos, and for extended families to keep in touch.

A lot of families allow children to have WhatsApp, when they would not allow them to have TikTok, and up until quite recently, some would not even have called it a social media platform. Where we think we have problems with disinformation on TikTok and Facebook, other countries have them with WhatsApp. What about YouTube? For many people, YouTube is not social media; it is a place where they go to watch videos or for music. But because it has user-generated content, it is also social media; it is certainly capable of sucking up a lot of young people’s time, and it has potential rabbit holes that people can fall down.

What about gaming? Gaming is different from social media, but modern gaming also has quite a lot of social media-like functions, such as lists of friends. Certainly, it is a way of trying to create communities of people with common interests. It is also often linked to the use of Discord or to streaming on Twitch. And, again, it certainly takes up a lot of time—unless, of course, someone is in China, where the Government will allow them to do it for only one hour a day, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

All of the above have risks attached, and they all have negatives, but we are unlikely to say that we want to ban them all—far from it. There is also a different risk: if we take one thing and ban it based on its specific features—its specific definition—we just push people to other places. Other things will then get more social-media characteristics, and children may end up in darker places on the internet. All of that is probably why the Australians ended up where they did: saying that it is probably more about specific functionality and that, at the end, it might be about having to make case-by-case judgments.

We worry about content; unwanted, inappropriate contact, as others have said; the excessive time children spend on platforms; potential addiction; the effects on sleep and concentration; and myopia. Crucially—my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) covered this very well—these technologies can also crowd out other things. Whether they, in and of themselves, are good or bad, there are only 24 hours in a day, and we want children, in the time they are not at school and not asleep, to be able to access the full range of things that childhood should be all about.

Creative Industries

Siân Berry Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I am late in the debate, and we have a bit of a time limit already, so I will struggle to make all the points I would like to make. I will write to the Minister with any I fail to make—I think he knows what I will be chasing him up on.

I want to follow the hon. Members for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) and for Bury North (Mr Frith) in being a little philosophical with my points today. I believe that participation and enjoyment of the arts is a human right, as article 27 of the universal declaration of human rights says. It forms part of our post-Holocaust legacy of putting together a strong framework to recognise and protect the purpose and value of humanity after we saw just how bad things can get. As a Green, I spend a lot of time working hard to ensure the continuation of our ecological and physical environment which is necessary for our civilisation, but the reasons for our civilisation are just as much what gets me out of bed in the morning to come and do this job. I would argue for the arts and creativity, regardless of their impact on our GDP, any day of the week.

Last week, I had the very great honour of speaking at the Music Venue Trust’s annual report launch here on the parliamentary estate. I was absolutely delighted to do so because my constituency is home to so many amazing grassroots music and performance venues. We have the Green Door Store, Alphabet, Rossi Bar, the Prince Albert, Hope and Ruin, the Folklore Rooms, Komedia—I could go on and on. Since I was elected, I have been shocked at the amount of work venues and their allies still have to do to fight off damaging developments. In 2023, as other Members have mentioned, the Music Venue Trust reported that we lost 125 trading grassroots music venues. That trend has now reduced, but it is still not zero. The Music Venue Trust’s emergency response service—it has a huge caseload, with more than 200 cases last year—has a very good success rate in fighting off terrible planning applications, but it does so alongside music venues that are putting a lot of time and effort into that work. We are still seeing far too many appeals taken forward, some of which are successful.

I recognise that the adoption of the agent of change principle guidance in the NPPF has made a difference, but we need to go further. What remains to be done is to put the agent of change principle into a statutory framework. I raised that in this House with the Minister in November. As well as being excited that the Secretary of State and Ed Sheeran had a chat last week, the Minister told me that that chat involved talking about that precise issue. I have chased it up since, but I am still looking for a timetable, so I hope the Minister can today provide more details.

It is not just music that is fantastic in Brighton and Hove. We have a huge number of artisans, artists, makers, designers, restorers and creative businesses too. They depend on an infrastructure of studios, workshops and gallery spaces to not only make their work, but to show it and sell it to Brighton Pavilion residents and visitors alike. Those spaces are facing threats, including the need for refurbishment. The amazing Phoenix Art Space needs to refurbish. It is looking for space to move into and expand into later, but it is really struggling to find it. New England House, the first ever high-rise industrial business centre, is a light industrial space that many makers use. It needs urgent fire safety work. People are facing either refurbishment over an incredibly long time or possibly moving out in the meantime. We need the Government to support those kinds of venues.

My constituency is also packed full of inspiring theatre, comedy, dance and cabaret, and people working as writers and in media production and digital creativity. Many of those creatives have written to me with their serious concerns about the Government’s consultation on AI and copyright. I was pleased that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) mentioned the Digital Economy Act. Although not in this place, I was a campaigner on those issues at that time. In my last minute, I want to reflect very briefly on whether we as a society failed at that time, in those debates on digital impacts on creativity and copyright, to look at copyright terms—the amount of time for which copyright extends. It is very, very long, and we find now that copyright is being held in many older works not by the original creators but by rights holders.

I wrote something for a national magazine which, ironically, is now behind a paywall, so I cannot see exactly what I wrote, but I remember that I suggested that a copyright term of 10 or 20 years might be reasonable so that the young man who sat down and wrote “Yesterday” yesterday is protected for a reasonable period. Then we could start to build up public domain works and provide useful AI tools to train in ways that do not rip off creators. If we had thought about that earlier, there would probably be a simpler answer to the knotty question with which Ministers are grappling today.

I welcome the debate, and hope that we can continue to discuss this subject in the interesting way in which Members have discussed it today—Members who are genuine experts in their fields, and genuinely creative as well. However, it worries me that we are facing a bit of a watershed whereby today’s creators will not be rewarded, and we may get the law very slightly wrong once again when we look at the interaction of the modern world with the oldest part of our civilisation that exists, which is art.