Social Media Use: Minimum Age Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Science, Innovation & Technology
Tom Gordon
Main Page: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)Department Debates - View all Tom Gordon's debates with the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology
(1 day, 19 hours ago)
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Tony Vaughan
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We will not protect children through just Government or social media while expecting parents to do nothing. Of course, we parents will have to do our part. Interestingly, on that point, I was going to say that an important potential measure is the approach put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) in his private Member’s Bill, the Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill. His concept, which I hope to hear more about in the course of this debate, is about raising the age of data consent from 13 to 16, which essentially stops the social media companies being able to harvest data and keep feeding the kind of content that will be harmful. That seems to me a no-brainer.
Very briefly, I want to talk about smartphones in school, an issue closely connected to the one posed by the petitioner. Many teachers and parents who I have talked to believe that this “never seen, never heard” guidance, which was introduced by the previous Government, is not working. We have students still using phones during break time and often during lessons, and the problems that that causes are significant. I have had many teachers say to me, “This takes up so much time—it is a huge distraction and it interferes with learning.”
Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)
Prior to entering Parliament, I worked for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, a type 1 diabetes charity, and one of the issues that came to light when this measure was previously proposed by the Government was the fact that children who might need to use their phones to monitor their type 1 diabetes, or who have parent carer’s responsibilities, need to have an exemption. That creates a stigma between children who might have a medical requirement to use their mobile device and those who do not. How would the hon. and learned Gentleman see this measure interacting with that?
Tony Vaughan
Every school has to comply with the Equality Act 2010. Whatever policy a school puts in place, one would have to check that what they are doing complies with the law. Those sorts of exceptions would obviously have to be looked at very carefully.
We do not have to look far to see examples of local areas that have banned smartphones in schools, such as the London borough of Barnet.