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My friend Daisy and I started a WhatsApp group in early February. We've both got daughters who are coming up to secondary school age. That's Claire Fernie Hough, whose daughters are seven and nine years old.
In the UK, the norm is that by 12, 97% of children will have a smartphone. And we were looking into the future with absolute horror about the fact that they were either going to have to get a smartphone or we risked them being the odd one out and them being ostracised. They aren't the only parents who are increasingly concerned about how much their children interact with technology such as smartphones from a young age.
At the top of their concerns is social media. These platforms are designed by the brightest brains in the world to keep us all scrolling and clicking 24 hours a day. That's their business model. That's how they want to make profit, of course, for their shareholders. Many parents and teachers worry that screen time distracts children from schoolwork and keeps them from playing outside or forming relationships in the real world. They also worry about children staying up all night or accessing harmful content.
and about the risks they face of being bullied online. We thought we're in an impossible situation as parents, so we decided just to set up a group. We thought it would be just for probably a few of our friends for solidarity. And then Daisy posted the story on Instagram and it went viral overnight. We got 1,000 people joining within a day, 2,000 people joining within two days.
Claire and Daisy's group, called Smartphone Free Childhood, now has more than 70,000 members in Britain.
And it's expanding into other countries too. We've got people coming on saying, you know, my child is being shown pornography at school. I just don't know what to do, you know, and people just really giving that support and solidarity. When we started, we really thought it was just us who felt like this, which is part of the reason for starting the group. And what we've realised is that many, many, many thousands of parents were all quietly feeling the same, but just not feeling they could talk about it.
The group has a relatively simple solution to its worries.
delay the age at which children are given smartphones and when they can use social media. Accessing the internet on laptops and devices that aren't in your pocket 24 hours a day is obviously fine with the right controls. The issue is that we have this incredibly powerful computer in our pockets all the time and even adults find it hard to get away from, don't they? You know, I certainly find controlling my own screen use really, really hard, but I've got an adult developed brain.
It's not just parents who are raising the alarm. Researchers too have noticed a correlation between the rise of smartphones and a decline in the mental health of children. The share of American teenagers reporting at least one major depressive episode in the past year has increased by more than 150% since 2010. Suicides have taken a sharp rise too. But correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.
So how concerned should parents and everyone else be about the effects of screen time on the health of children? I'm Alok Jha and this is Babbage from The Economist. Today, how to think about the impacts of smartphones and social media on the health of teenagers.
Someone who's been reporting on the debate over screen time in teenagers is Tom Wainwright. He's our technology and media editor. Thanks for joining me, Tom. Thanks, Alec. Now, Tom, this is a vexed issue and the arguments around it are complex. I just wonder if we can just start with...
How you understand the arguments on all sides, just if you can lay them out for me so we can talk about them, that would be very handy. Yeah, well, people have been talking about screen time for many, many years. I mean, I spent a good part of my childhood in the 80s and 90s in front of a screen. But I think the screens that people are really worried about now are smartphone screens. They've been with us really for about 15 years, give or take. And that 15 years more or less coincides with a period in which most people agree there's been something of a decline
decline in the mental health of young people in many rich countries. And so people see those two things happening at the same time, and they wonder if those might be linked. Are
Other people aren't so sure. You know, on the other side of the argument, you have people saying that this is a moral panic and that in the olden days, people said the same thing about stuff like pop music or the novel. But nonetheless, parents are concerned and governments are increasingly concerned as well. And so we see initiatives like here in the UK, for example, the government is reportedly considering banning the sale of smartphones to people under 16. So there's lots of concern and people are beginning to act on it.
And it's probably the case that everyone's right to some extent and everyone's also overplaying their hand a little bit as well, which is why it sometimes can be a bit difficult to tease out what's going on, especially given that evidence itself is not exactly apparent in lots of cases. But as you say, concern amongst parents and teachers does seem to be on the rise. That's why there's groups like Smartphone Free Childhood, like the one we heard at the beginning of the podcast. That's why they're emerging, aren't they?
Yeah, that's right. And we asked Claire Ferniehoff specifically what kinds of things their group is concerned about.
We know that they're spending a really large amount of time on social media, whether it's TikTok, Snapchat, WhatsApp. And we know that a lot of the content that's being shared is really extreme. So recent stats showed that 27% of children see pornography before the age of 11. Really shocking statistic that by the age of 15, 75% of kids have seen a beheading video. So because of the algorithms in terms of social media, you get pushed towards more and more extreme content.
We know that boys are being shown increasingly misogynistic content as well within minutes. And that's actually crossing over into the classroom and creating a big change in behaviour. And we know also that there's a huge amount of cyberbullying as well. At night, they can't get away from it. And a lot of kids are online all night and the bullying is happening all night. So kids are turning up absolutely exhausted.
A lot of the numbers that Claire just talked about are from surveys by the Children's Commissioner for England, which is a public body protecting and promoting the rights of children. Now, Tom, some of the numbers that Claire mentioned there do sound incredibly extreme. I mean, we've both got children and can probably share stories about how attractive smartphones are to them.
And it's easy to understand why so many people get concerned. Yeah, that's right. It's certainly a hot topic in our household. And just by coincidence, actually, this morning, there was a message on our local school WhatsApp group from another parent sending a link around to smartphone-free childhood saying, you know, perhaps people should sign up for this thing. So I think it's definitely something that people are concerned about. And to me, the interesting thing is there's obviously worry about the kind of extreme content that Claire mentioned,
But in a way, I think the more common concern is more just what smartphone use and particularly social media use might do to children, even when we're talking about more harmless content, just the constant kind of stream of
comparison with other children and seeing what other people are up to and getting a fear of missing out. I think people are worried also just about the effect that smartphones have on children. They seem to have an almost kind of hypnotic effect on some children and I think a lot of parents don't like that. So is this about the fact that screens can be distracting or is there something about social media and the things that kids are using them for that is of real concern to campaigners like Claire?
I think it's a bit of both. And one of the things that's difficult about this debate is that screen time obviously is such a broad category, which includes everything from TV to video games to social media to messaging and everything else that we use our phones for these days. But I think with social media, there's a particular concern about the way that the feeds that you get on a social network are personalised and tailored, whereas with other media, parents maybe get a bit of a sense of what their children are consuming.
As parents, we're in such a difficult position because a lot of parents, we don't actually know what our kids are doing. We know that the kids can get round any controls pretty easily. They're always a few steps ahead of the grown-ups, unfortunately. So I think often parents just don't know. And also, of course, what we're seeing on social media as adults is so, so different from
because of the algorithm to what they're seeing. So it's very easy for us to be in a sort of full sense of security that actually is not that bad. But we just don't know what's happening. And I think that is the main problem. OK, so Tom, what do Claire and her group actually want to do about any of this?
She told us about a couple of things. One is limiting what smartphones can do, and the other is more accountability from the tech platforms. We want to change the norm so that parents all feel empowered to delay giving smartphones to their children until at least 14. We want to raise the age limit to 16 for social media and make sure that there's an external way of verifying age on smartphones.
And we want there to be really, really heavy fines for companies that essentially break these rules. And we want governments to act as well. We would favour the idea of a new category of phone that's essentially for children, that's truly safe for children, rather than just us being told that something's safe and actually it turns out it's not.
So we would favour a phone that looks cool and that, you know, potentially plays music and has maps on it, but doesn't do anything else and certainly doesn't have social media. And maybe they've got Snake on it that we all used to play on Nokia, but no more. I mean, that's an interesting idea. I mean, phones can be locked down in many ways. So if parents are tech savvy, they can do these things by themselves. But I'm
Are the concerns that Claire and her colleagues are worried about, are they being considered by governments and lawmakers or even tech companies around the world? Yeah, we're seeing governments get increasingly involved in this area. For example, Florida, the state of Florida, recently banned social media for under-14s. The ban's not taken effect yet, but they've passed that law. California is debating various measures, including stopping social media apps from sending notifications overnight.
And others are looking at things like setting time limits for children. Utah has imposed what it calls a digital curfew. New York State is looking at options too. And China has set various limits on screen time as well. They've had a bit of a crackdown on gaming. South Korea in the past passed a law banning gaming after midnight. So there's various things like this going on. And here in the UK, as I mentioned, the government has
floated anonymously the idea of banning phones for under-16s, whether or not that goes ahead is another matter. But it's something that governments everywhere are talking about and polling parents on to see what they make of it. OK, so the authorities seem to be taking the concerns with some degree of seriousness.
But it's hard to see how any of those policies you've just mentioned could work without involving the technology and social media companies as well, because they're the ones who actually control all of this in the end. What's their position on some of the issues we've discussed? Well, they've already introduced various rules for their younger users, often as a result of regulation. But we see things like time limits on these platforms or reminders to take a break after an hour, that kind of thing. But
But one thing that you increasingly hear from those platforms, actually, is that they, in some cases, are quite keen that the burden be shifted onto the smartphone makers instead. And they say, well, if people are concerned about younger people on social networks or using particular apps, why not have that kind of age verification at the system level? So in other words, make it Apple's problem or make it Android's problem rather than the
problem of TikTok or Facebook or whichever network it might be. So there's a bit of a blame game going on there and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, whether or not the likes of Meta are able to shift responsibility onto the likes of Apple.
The tech companies are also benefiting from the fact that at the moment the evidence isn't completely clear-cut on this. There's plenty of evidence of correlation between screen time and smartphone use and poor mental health among young people, but the evidence of causation is still pretty thin on the ground. OK, well, that's something we'll investigate next. Tom, thank you very much for now. We'll join you again a little bit later on.
Social media companies, the way they make money is by advertising. So their goal is to keep the person engaged as long as possible in that platform.
Carol Vidal is a psychiatrist who specialises in children and adolescents at Johns Hopkins University. The common ones are the like and the love because they're positive reinforcement. So positive reinforcement is the best way to keep a behaviour going because you want to get the positive feedback basically more and more as a person, right? So you don't have a dislike button, for example, on Facebook or on Instagram. You only have likes and loves or retweets and things like that.
There's other ways that they do it. For example, the endless scrolling and streaming that is basically you're engaged on the platform and then nothing happens. And then suddenly out of the blue, suddenly there's something really interesting to you, but you never know when it's going to happen. So it's a little bit like the slot machines where you get the rewards at times when you don't know when that's going to happen. So it makes you be engaged more and more. And then another one is, for example, with Snapchat, they have these streaks where you
you are basically texting back with your friend. And once you reach a streak of 100 days, you get an emoji. That's really all you get. But you're engaged with your friend texting back and forth for 100 days. So that's a way to make sure that the person is engaging with the platform. Now, there's been a lot of discussion for many years now about how the use of smartphones and social media can be linked to
to a decline in the mental health of children. Now, the timing seems to coincide with the rise of use of smartphones and social media. And, you know, we need to be careful here. It suggests some sort of association, but is there actually any evidence of a causal link between the two things?
That is a really interesting question. And I think that's the key question, right? So people are making inferences based on population data and assuming that that's what's happening at the individual level. And I think that's part of the issue of all this debate about whether social media is bad for your mental health.
So I think social media really is a tool. It definitely can be used in negative ways, but it's hard to say that social media causes depression, for example. There's so many environmental factors that can affect depression that it would be hard to pinpoint just one as the cause for all the problems. So I think that at the population level, we do see that there has been a rise in mental health problems, but at the individual level, that might be different. And
The other thing is that, for example, when you look at all the research that has been done over the last few years, there's a lot of cross-sectional studies, which means that you look at one point in time and then you say, oh, yeah, they have high depression and they have high social media use. But you don't really know if it's just because the people that have high depression are also engaging more on social media. You can't really say that.
There was first no depression and then social media came in that person and then they ended up with depression. So it sounds like there's a lot of environmental factors to disentangle. What type of evidence do you think a scientist like you would need to be sure that there really was some sort of causal link?
So the evidence is increasing. And actually, there was an umbrella review, which is basically a review of meta-analysis and other reviews, which contains a lot of data. And it didn't really find that much of a strong relationship between mental health and social media. So I think that is already some evidence that it's not as strong as we think.
I think that ideally you would put people in two groups and you would randomize them to a group with the exposure would be social media and another group without the exposure and then follow them over time. But that's really hard to do. Yeah, that sounds like a very difficult study to sort of get off the ground, to be honest. Yeah. And also like everyone is using social media right now, right? So you have to like ask people not to use it. So I think
the best evidence would be following up people over time and controlling for all these other factors that would influence depressive symptoms or other mental health problems. This debate has become polarised in popular culture and also in academia to some extent with people
having very clear views on the harms or the lack of evidence for the harms of social media. I just wonder what your view is. Why do you think that the debate is so difficult to have? I think these days everything's difficult to have. And I think it's part of the problem is that there's this thinking of like it's either good or bad or it's all, you know, a black and white type of thinking.
where either you don't use it at all and you have to get rid of social media or you can use it without any protections or regulations. I think there's sort of like a middle ground that would be most helpful, but it's really hard these days to have conversations about it
it's a complex issue. So, you know, people sometimes miss the nuances. But I think most people agree that there's things that you should be doing that even if you don't agree that there's a super strong relationship between social media and the worsening of the mental health in children, we all agree that you need to have some sort of protection and help people have social media literacy, because even if it doesn't affect mental health, social media has had effects in other ways in society, right? So I
I think we can all agree on some aspects of it. Well, here's hoping. That sounds very sensible. Carol, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. My pleasure. The scientific research looking at the links between the use of smartphones and social media to mental health problems in teenagers doesn't have any conclusive answers yet. But that doesn't diminish the experience and concerns of parents like Claire, who we heard from at the start of the podcast.
Next, we'll speak to a psychologist who thinks that people are looking at this problem from the wrong perspective. Instead of bickering over whether social media causes issues in teenagers, he wants to know why it is that some teenagers do perfectly well online while others struggle to cope. Pete Etchells thinks we should reframe the way we all think about social media. That's coming up.
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On the show so far, we've discussed how social media can be associated with worrying behaviours in children. But the issue is not so clear cut.
I think one of the things that we very often forget in this whole debate, particularly when we're talking about social media, is that fundamentally what these programmes, these media are about is connecting people. Pete Etchells is a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University in Britain, and he's the author of a new book, Unlocked, The Real Science of Screen Time. It's providing social experiences, it's providing ways to
foster and maintain existing connections, to create new ones. There's a line of research that suggests that that's what teenagers are doing, right? So they're not using social media necessarily to talk to complete random strangers all the time. What they're doing is using social media to manage and maintain the existing offline relationships that they have. We forget then that there are lots of benefits to that.
In some cases, certain platforms really allow them to express their creativity, particularly for marginalized communities. They're really important sources of support. There are some real problems with social media, real problems, serious problems. But that doesn't mean it's uniquely bad for us. Now, some people claim that smartphones, social media, all of these things we're talking about are addictive in some way. And they mean that in a negative sense.
You just don't use those sorts of words when you're talking about these things. Just tell me why. I think it's very easy to fall into talking about this sort of stuff in what I've called an addictive framework. We have this day-to-day common usage of the word addiction, which means that we really enjoy this thing or we use it a lot. Maybe sometimes we use it more than we would like to as well. And then it starts to get more negative connotations. That is very different to the formal clinical definition of addiction.
But even though we're aware of that, the two very often get conflated. So you see phrases crop up like this app or this game or this particular aspect of an app is addictive by design. Smartphones were designed to be addictive.
That's not the case. That would be a really terrible business strategy to deliberately design addicting things. What we actually mean there is that they've been designed to be user friendly or compelling or convenient and we use them a lot and sometimes we use them too much. But even if they're not clinically addictive, though, people are going back for more, aren't they? They are falling into the trap of finding it lots of fun and enjoyable to a point where sometimes it can be problematic.
Yeah, absolutely. I don't want people to think that this is an apology for big tech. It's absolutely the case that people develop problematic relationships with their phones, with particular apps, things like that. I think the point that I'm trying to get across is that there's a different way of thinking about that relationship that doesn't rely on having to accept that all of these things are addictive, for which there's not much evidence.
And the problem with that sort of addiction framework is it leaves you with relatively little in terms of solutions. It inevitably leaves you with solutions like what we call digital detoxes and abstinence, basically. If you feel as though you've developed an addiction to Instagram, say, the solution there is to stop using Instagram altogether. Now, the problem with that is that it ignores the fact that there are some positive aspects of our use.
Maybe a better way of thinking about the relationship that we have with digital tech is not in terms of addiction, but in terms of habit formation, technology habit formation. So are you addicted to social media? It's very, very unlikely that's the case. Have you developed bad habits with social media? Yes, I'm sure all of us have. And we've also developed some good habits with our digital technologies as well.
Now, the thing about habits is that they can be changed. You know, it's hard. It requires time and intention and effort. But they are things that we have control over.
One of the first things that we need to do really is to just simply acknowledge that we've developed them. We don't need to be guilty or ashamed of that, but just being more mindful about our tech use in good and bad situations and slowly moving towards weeding out those bad habits and keeping the good ones is, I think, a much more empowering, much more positive approach.
I suppose it's also obviously easier to develop habits around social media use or smartphone use when the companies that you're interacting with are putting loads of research into making their products much more habit forming essentially so you're kind of fighting against this system where the
The product is very easy to use. It's not that people form these habits in a vacuum, is it? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think this is why in talking about these in a bit more of a complex, a bit more of nuanced way, we can really start to pin down what it is that we're bothered about with social media design, what we find problematic. And we can target that a little bit more specifically and hold tech companies to account. So, you know, what we're talking about here is aspects of social media design, aspects of tech design,
Essentially, they're trying to make things more convenient for us. If that's truly what we're aiming for in their design, they absolutely have to have user well-being at the forefront, at the core of their design. Now, the problem is that if you implement those sorts of algorithms, not thinking about what happens when they potentially go wrong, they go wrong.
and they go wrong in quite disastrous ways for some people. I mean, I think that that's a very objective way of looking at it. But I guess people who are more worried about technology companies might argue slightly to change the tone of what you're saying, which is that, yes, they're making things more convenient for people. But also, actually, their real incentive is just to keep you on their platforms for as long as possible by whatever mechanism they can use. Because
because that's what makes them more money. And so, yes, convenience is part of it, but also there could be all sorts of other things like enraging you and other things. But let's start talking about some evidence now. What evidence is there that smartphones and social media use actually affect the health of teenagers? So the place that we're at now is really there's a feeling that social media is bad for kids.
There's a few problems with that line of argument, really. And it's one that I've, to be honest, I found very difficult to discuss because we start talking about different things at different times. So even like in the space of a couple of sentences, we might first start talk about social media and depression. But then next we might start saying, oh, yeah, OK, but what about Instagram and body image? Or, you know, what about social media and self-harm rates?
Because what happens is that you start looking into the data specifically and different trends seem to match up with different things happening in terms of social media, say. And this is the argument that we've got into at the minute. We basically got to a situation where we're trying to figure out who's right. Is it the case that actually we can say that social media causes mental ill health? Or is this all a bit of a mirage? Is it that there are other factors that explain this?
I feel like, in a way, those are the wrong questions to ask. They're the wrong conversations to have. Trying to say, does X cause Y on this global scale? I think there are more complex, more nuanced questions to ask around why is it the case that some people really
thrive online. It's not that a given teenager won't come across problematic content, but they'll be able to weather that. Whereas in other situations, teenagers really struggle.
And trying to understand that question, I think, is a more useful one because it will allow us to identify what are the specific things that we need to maybe regulate or maybe get the industry to change. And what it doesn't do is say we need to get rid of it all because that will magically fix things because it won't. So if the research is unclear, which I think is a fair thing to say,
people who might believe that still are concerned, aren't they, about their kids using smartphones? I mean, I think you are as well, you know, with your own children.
So you're not thinking that smartphones or technology is inherently evil, but they still cause some sort of anxiety. We've all probably felt that horrible feeling at the end of the day when we've wasted too much time on social media. You're meant to just look at, I don't know, Instagram for like 10 minutes and then two hours later, you're still there. I mean, I've done it. Tell me how you would advise people to think about those moments when they're confused about what the impacts and things really are, but they kind of do it and then they feel a bit guilty. And then there's all sorts of weird emotions going on.
Yeah. Your example of being on Instagram, we've all got lived experience of that. And I think in terms of rethinking how we frame what's going on there, if we start worrying, oh, that's happened because this thing is designed to addict me to Instagram.
That worries us, that panics us, that's not a great, we maybe feel really guilty and shamed about that. So in terms of thinking about those situations, then what we need to start doing is, you know, just take a bit of a pause and go, okay, that wasn't great for me. I'm not happy with what happened there. Why did it happen? What was leading up to me not doing that? Was it because I was doing it mindlessly? Is it because I'm worried about something and I'm trying to distract myself?
What can I do differently next time so that I might feel better? And literally just that awareness and that self-reflection is the first step in trying to change our habits for the better. But it's also one of the most important ones. Okay. So if we as adults feel these things...
then the obvious question is, how can we be careful about their effects on kids? Because they're going to be much more confused about it. I guess at least as adults, you can sort of cognitively step out of it and think, this is what's happening. I can try and restrict myself or learn from it. But kids are running mostly on emotions as any parent knows. And you try and help them to sort of make their own decisions, but often they'll make the wrong ones
Because they can't make any other decisions. They just haven't got the ability to do that. Yeah. I think this is where it's important to take a real interest in their kind of online experience, their digital experience. So we know from some lines of research that...
kids fare better when parents and caregivers curate that online experience they provide a scaffolding for it so it's not just about going here you go here's a phone go wild so it's about thinking about if they want to have their own phone why what are the reasons for that do they align with our values what we care about as a family and having conversations about that is the most important thing
So it's not about saying, yes, you can have a phone or no, you can't end off because I'm the parent. But it's about saying, well, I'm worried about you having this or you downloading this app because of X, Y, Z. Why do you want it? What can you get out of it? Can you understand my worries? Do you have worries about it? Because they're not blind to the dangers.
They know the value that they get out of certain apps and certain games, but they're also really worried about what that might mean if they come across something harmful.
The key thing in those situations is that we provide support networks for our kids. We provide an ability that if they do find something online, they come across something online that they feel uncomfortable or upsets them or they feel harms them, that they have people to talk to about that. It's not going to be the case that they go to their parents or caregivers or whoever and they're worried about saying what happened because they're worried about being in trouble or being told off.
Because what happens in those situations is that they start to hide their tech use. And that's the worst thing. That's the thing that we really want to avoid. I guess this idea of thinking about what you want to get out of apps before you use them, talking about them much more, being transparent is really useful. Do we need more infrastructure, though, to be in place to enable children especially to actually...
act on those sorts of pieces of good advice I mean you might have heard for example people talking about banning phones or smartphones or social media for people under 16 does that make sense to you if that worked it would be an easy way of stopping younger children from accessing this information what's your view on that so I get asked this question a lot and actually going back to my own experience one of the things that we're talking about in our family is
We want to postpone smartphones being given to our kids for as long as possible. Again, not because we think they're addictive or fundamentally evil, but we just don't see a function for them until much later ages. Now, that's all fine and well and good, but absolutely what has to come along with that is building digital literacy skills.
So we need to be better at training kids as to what life is like online, what the risks are, what the problems are, who to talk to when you come across problematic content, how to deal with that, how we use smartphones and how we use them in healthy versus unhealthy ways to do that sort of training before the point at which they get to actually owning a smartphone. Because if you just wait longer, they're still not building those skills, right? So they're still going to
potentially develop problems later on. And I feel like that's a bit lost in the conversation at the minute. So the problem that I've got with these sorts of bans in isolation is that there might be unintended consequences of them. They might feel as though they do the right thing and they're a success on day one or day 30. But by pushing these problems further down the line, they have these unintended consequences and actually have a net negative effect. Pete, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for having me.
To round off our investigation, I'm joined again by the economist Tom Wainwright. Tom, we've heard that there's very little solid evidence that provides any causal links between smartphones and social media use.
and the adverse health effects that people are seeing in teenagers. So what are we supposed to do with this imperfect knowledge? Should people and governments just wait for better and more conclusive studies before anyone starts to implement policies around how children use technology? Well, ideally, you want perfect evidence, obviously. But people who are in favour of change say, well, if there is this relationship, if screen time or social media are
leading to poor mental health and even driving a higher suicide rate, then implementing restrictions or some kind of ban would have very, very positive effects. And if it turns out that we're wrong, then the negative effects of saying that, you know, you can't use Instagram when you're 13 would be limited. It's tough, though, because if you introduce your child to these things,
when they're a bit younger, you have a better chance of educating them in how to behave online and how to use these things when they're maybe a little bit more compliant. Whereas if they get these things suddenly when they're 16, then they might just go bananas. I mean, that's one argument. Are you saying teenagers are difficult to control? Well, my eldest is 10, so I'm not the expert, but I've heard that it gets harder rather than easier. You have this in store. Yeah.
But you also would face practical problems in the sense that, you know, you say you want to regulate social media, but drawing that line is harder than it might sound. I mean, what is social media? I mean, you might think, well, OK, Instagram, that's one example. But then you've got other things like, you know, the chat function in video games. That's a way that increasingly children, including mine,
communicate with people they know and with strangers online. So do you restrict that kind of thing? Do you restrict messaging apps, which are arguably a pretty healthy way for children to communicate with people they know? So restricting social media, I think, in practice could be more complicated than it sounds in theory. I think Pete Etchells' argument makes quite a lot of sense. You know, smartphones and social media affect
different children differently. And we've all got roles to play, whether we're parents, teachers, governments or companies, to ensure that the children at risk are identified so that more people, everyone is safe online. Tom, after your reporting on this, how do you see that tension? I think it's tough. I mean, I tend to feel that when it comes to
children about, you know, the dangers of life. It's better to teach them how to deal with them rather than try to sort of protect them from them indefinitely. That's my gut feeling. I think one thing that's changing is the way that people use social media. And I think that ancient people like you and me need to remember that the social media that young people are using today is
are not quite the same as the kind of social networks that we grew up with. I mean, I think adults tend to still picture something like Facebook or Instagram when they're talking about social media. And the way that people use social media now is really quite different. There's much less, for example, in the way of posting about yourself on public networks than there used to be. It used to be that people would
post, you know, pictures of themselves on holiday or whatever onto an open network like Instagram. What these companies are finding increasingly is that that kind of chat is moving more to closed group conversations on platforms like WhatsApp and people are posting less about themselves online on open networks.
So people are using social networks in a way that's quite different and in a way that the jury's still out and we still need more evidence. But it seems to me that this is potentially a somewhat less harmful way of using social media than the old social networks when people were constantly posting about themselves, even at a very young age, and constantly comparing themselves with others and
leaving themselves open to comments from strangers on the internet. That kind of social media is waning. And the social experience now is more of a kind of small group experience where
and more one where people are separately watching videos from influencers rather than people that they know, and they're not posting as many of their own videos either. So we've got to make sure that when we have this debate, we are focused on the kind of social media that young people are using now rather than the kind of social media that we, their parents, used a generation ago. As you say, the jury's probably still out on that. And the way that teenagers use social media could change again very quickly, right?
I can imagine that might be quite a contentious point to make to parents, right? Other people made the point that that argument to them is somewhat reminiscent of the argument that pro-gun lobby sometimes uses when they say that guns don't kill people, it's people with guns that kill people. The parallel being that social networks aren't dangerous, it's just how you use them. And I think that's a good line. But I think the difference surely is that a means of communication has more, you
useful uses than a gun would. I mean, maybe a better parallel would be something like a kitchen knife. It's true that it's not knives that kill people, it's people with knives that kill people, but we wouldn't ban knives on that basis. And maybe social media is similar in the sense that it seems that it does cause harm to some people, young people and old people, but it also brings a lot of happiness to people. And trying to fix that trade-off rather than just ban it is something that many people think is worth pursuing.
So I think what's become clear from our conversation and with everyone we've spoken to on this program is that
No one is saying that all smartphones are terrible things and they should be completely banned forever. No one is saying that there are no problems with the way that teenagers use these devices. Somewhere in the middle, the truth lies. But how confident are you, Tom, that the necessary conversations are happening to try and find where that line is and how to help teenagers to make the best decisions about all of this?
I think we're gradually finding our way towards answers on this. I mean, it's still a relatively new technology, obviously. And I think that one thing that people are increasingly realizing is that when it comes to screen time, it's not so much about the amount of screen time. It's about how you spend that time.
And I, you know, as a parent, I'd rather my child watched an hour of the BBC than half an hour of YouTube, you know. And I think that parents increasingly are getting the message that screen time isn't just one thing and that there's a kind of spectrum of wholesomeness, if you like. And so I think ultimately it's not going to fall just to parents to do this. I think we're probably going to see a bit more regulation in this area, but nor is it going to fall entirely to the tech firms. I think this is something that families are going to continue arguing about amongst themselves.
All right, Tom. Well, I'm sure we're going to have this conversation again at some point in the future when hopefully there'll be a bit more research and a bit more understanding about the links that we've been discussing. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks, Alec.
Tom's reporting on the use of technology by teenagers was part of last week's cover story in The Economist, all about the good and not so good things about being part of Gen Z. Our colleagues on the Finance and Economics desk had a very upbeat tale to tell about why Gen Z is so unprecedentedly rich, which I'm sure will bring a smile to the Zoomer generation.
Find that story and more on our app if you subscribe to The Economist. And remember, subscribers can also listen to our other specialist weekly podcasts, such as Money Talks on the world of business and The Weekend Intelligence, where economist journalists tell the stories that mean the most to them. Thanks for listening to Babbage. Our producer is Jason Hoskin with mixing and sound design by Nico Rofast. The executive producer is Hannah Marino.
I'm Alok Jha, and in London, this is The Economist.
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