I once reviewed a packet of pro-biotic tampons on Twitter. Luckily, my son doesn’t yet know what Twitter was, let alone shown any interest in joining the internet smear of footjam now known as X. So perhaps, thanks to the proposed social media ban, my enzyme-rich orifices are going to remain a merciful secret.
Like many Millennial parents, I welcome the social media ban for under 16s with open arms, claw-like hands and a slightly glazed stare. I feel a powerful urge to warn young people away from the endless slimy scroll of digital discord and barely-concealed advertising, in precisely the way yellow-toothed, grey-faced men in the smoking areas of pubs used to try and warn my friends and me against their own filthy habit. It’s not good kids! Stay away!
Yes, telling young people that social media is awful, as my fingers twitch to see what weird vegan recipes and artfully made beds have been recently uploaded to the internet is hypocritical. But aren’t hypocrites sometimes the best people to deliver the bad news? Our shame, our duplicity, our weakness and our dependency makes the argument for staying offline better than any well-crafted argument ever could.
According to the BBC, the planned ban will include Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube (but not YouTube Kids). Tech Secretary Liz Kendall apparently told the House of Commons that she wants this legislation “to come into force as early as possible in the first couple of months of 2027”. If things go to plan (and let’s be honest, that’s quite a hefty if), my children might well make it all the way through primary and secondary school, through their SATS, their GCSE coursework and the foothills of puberty without the attention-sucking mosquito of social media on their necks.
Of course, if I’m honest, my son is already watching YouTube. Since having another baby, and being tethered either to breastfeeding or other single-handed unpaid domestic labour, I have watched with frustration and self-reproach as he has slid further into the algorithm of Mario and Minecraft. The boy who once listened to audiobooks of Enid Blyton and CS Lewis on the sofa will now hungrily spend hours watching an American stranger with vocal fry and manicured eyebrows describe in arse-dissolving detail how he is “blasting his way through to the Nether” on Minecraft. All so I can have a few minutes to cook dinner or hang out the washing. At least he still reads comics.
As the author Matt Haig has pointed out on Instagram (yes, don’t worry, I am familiar with irony) banning social media is not a solution in and of itself. If we truly want to wrench our young minds away from the addictive, divisive, radicalising, creativity-bleaching, concentration vacuum of smartphones, social media and the internet, then we need to make the offline world better. We need to keep public space out of private hands. We need to reopen libraries, fund leisure centres, bring back Sure Start, create new nature reserves, invest in the high street, open skate parks, offer up time in rehearsal studios, put sports fields back under local authority control and make them free to access, fix the lighting and drainage in our housing estates, parks and underpasses, make public transport cheaper, reopen our youth centres, repurpose all those empty shops for music and flirting and dancing and board games and art and homework clubs and for God’s sake put some public toilets and some new benches out in the streets.
I do believe that restrictions, legal limits, even bans have their place (I am quite pleased that, say, knives are banned on buses). And so, if banning is the order of the day, here are just a few suggestions of other things we could throw into the pot: recorders, party bags, Robinsons Fruit Shoots, trousers with pretend drawstrings, slime, glitter, Happy Meals, kinetic sand, Bing bunny, nappy bags, plastic packets of chopped apple, the three inch hemline difference in shorts intended for girls or boys, primary school homework, headlice, pinworms and verrucas.
And if you can invent a VPN that gets round all that, then may God have mercy on you soul.
