The social media ‘curfew’ for kids is pointless tinkering around the edges

I can’t have been the only parent to tear my hair out on seeing the news, reported last week, that the Government is looking at a 10pm social media ‘curfew’ for kids, plus a two-hour limit on individual apps.

I’m sorry.  What?!

Not only is a 10pm device cut-off hopelessly late for kids who need to be in school the next day (what happened to reading a book before lights out?!), but the two hour limit in itself is two hours more than most parents would wish for their kids to be exposed to the cesspit world of social media. Plus, it isn’t just two hours: the small print of this mashup of meek and measly proposals indicates that the misnomered two hour ‘limit’ is actually nothing of the sort, applying as it would to each individual app rather than social media time in aggregate, leaving our tech-savvy youngsters free to triangulate their way around the limit by simply switching between apps.

Taken with the list of other (perhaps) well-intentioned but pathetic and paltry measures touted by policy-makers and regulators (also last week, Ofcom signalled its intention to develop additional proposals on how artificial intelligence can be used to detect illegal content and harms to children, a proposal mind-boggling in its obtuseness when the obvious option is simply to take kids off social media platforms in the first place), it leaves the UK as a distinct international outlier.

Multiple countries – including New Zealand, Austrialia and France – are now imposing full social media bans and many have banned the smartphone altogether from classrooms. In the UK, parents are begging en masse for Government action – a Parentkind poll last year found 77 per cent of primary school parents want a flat-out under-16s smartphones ban. Once again, our failure to act reeks of a Government pandering to a tech industry it sees as master, not servant. Indeed, this is no longer even a secret: reporting of the proposed curfew announced that:

“[Technology Secretary Peter] Kyle and his team have been in discussions with current and past employees of social media firms, who have suggested they'd be prepared to block kids' access at night, during school or after a certain amount of time using an app.”

We have reached a grim place for child welfare when a Secretary of State feels he must ask Big Tech what they are prepared to do rather than simply mandating they safeguard the millions of British children addicted to their platforms.

With a staggering one in five of our kids having a mental health disorder, only half of them meeting the Government’s recommended hour of daily exercise and three and a half million with vision problems, it is beyond doubt that our current approach of standing by and tinkering around the edges while the Government lets Big Tech ride roughshod over children’s lives has created a cohort-wide safeguarding failure for our youngsters.

If the language of ‘banning’ is too unpalatable for Kyle to take to his Big Tech overlords, with a bit of imagination and a few decent lawyers one could instead create a new licensing regime for a restricted, child-safe product. That would protect children by placing the current pernicious smartphone and its unrestricted algorithmic-driven apps off limits to kids, while opening up a new market which Big Tech could step into for child-friendly, restricted internet devices.  What’s not to like?

There is even the perfect legislative vehicle passing through Parliament now, in which to drop such an amendment: The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is about to enter its ping-pong stage with the Lords. The first words of the long title of that Bill are: “A Bill to make provision about the safeguarding and welfare of children.” However it rings hollow to the point of being disingenuous to speak of child safeguarding and well-being while failing to take immediate and effective action against the single greatest cause of harm to children, today: their excessive smartphone and social media use.