WEBVTT
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You might be about to ban millions of people from
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social media based solely on vibes. UK seems to be
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gunning for a social media ban at the moment, and
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the government seems to be preparing the ground for that ban.
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The media, myself included, have spent a lot of time
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talking about how that would work and speaking to the
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people that understandably want to ban the UK's children from
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social media. So we're going to look at the why
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not the case against a ban and speak to the
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people because there are a lot of them that are
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arguing that a ban isn't a good idea. Logically, the
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first thing to do when you're thinking about introducing sweeping
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and nationwide restrictions is to look at the evidence.
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There is, i would say zero evidence to support the
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efficacy of a band.
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The problem is there doesn't seem to be any We've
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got loads of opinion polls telling us that people want
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to ban, but nothing to say what that ban would
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actually do.
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He's one of the graphs. Actually they're done things that
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I'm talking about.
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Professor Sanda Vandalinden research is psychology at the University of Cambridge.
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What we need are population level randomized control trials to
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figure out what are the consequences of bands, who does
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it benefit and who does it harm.
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He recently published an article in the science journal Nature
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arguing there isn't enough evidence for a UK wide social
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media ban.
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Some parents reacted to that with the suggestion that you know,
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they have seen harms from social media come to their kids,
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and the social media companies aren't interested in fixing the problem,
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and so a ban is the only reasonable solution. And
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to that I would say that I fully agree that
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there can't be harms from social media and that some
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kids have been very negatively impacted. The reason why I
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don't think a ban is the right solution right now
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is because a ban also has the potential to harm
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parts of the population. Right so some parents see this
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as well, there's only benefits to a ban, But that's
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not true. You know, unlike smoking, unlike alcohol, there are
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benefits to social media. It depends on how you use
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social media, how often for what purposes. If you use
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social media for negative downward social comparisons, if you're comparing
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yourself to other people, if you're dooms growing, that's going
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to have a negative impact on your mental health. If
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you're using it to connect with friends and engage with
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social issues that might have a positive impact on your
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mental health.
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So, according to Sander, there's no evidence that a social
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media band could help teenagers, but what if it could
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harm them. I've headed back to London to find out.
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There are groups of teenagers take lgbt teenagers for example,
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who face higher levels of isolation, of bullying, of loneliness,
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and historically school and maybe home haven't been the kindest
55
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places for them, and then social media came along and
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they had somewhere to turn.
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Social media has absolutely been a lifeline for many LGBTQ
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plus young people. They tell us that day in day out.
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Simon Blake runs Stonewall UK. It's Europe's largest lgbt plus
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organization and it's against a social media ban.
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LGBTQ plus young people would be disproportionately affected, and the
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reason for that is that often they do not feel
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that they can talk to adults, to people in their
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peer groups, or to find helping other ways, so they
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look to the Internet to find other people like them
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or information that's available on social media.
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But this isn't a binary issue. A social media ban
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isn't the only option the UK's leading children's charity, the
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NSPCC doesn't support a social media ban, but it does
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have some fairly simple sounding alternatives to suggest.
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Soa mickey Welcome to the NSPCC's library. So, parents and
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children and young people across the country want to see
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urgent action. The reason why they're landing on a ban
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in many ways is because they just want government to
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do something. But this is a complex problem and we
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need to see a range of solutions. Firstly, we want
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to see tech companies enforce their own rules. Their terms
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and conditions say that under thirteen shouldn't be on their platforms,
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but two er point five million children and people are
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on their platforms. They could change that today. Secondly, we
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want to see targeting of addictive algorithms through legislation. Young
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people are sick of being sucked into a vortex of
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doom scrolling. They want action around that. And Thirdly, we
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want to ensure that social media platforms and platforms like
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WhatsApp have safety built in at the design of them,
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so that young people can't be sending and receiving harmful
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contents such as nud images.
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Okay, after a long time talking about teenagers, it's probably
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time we talk two s years un today. There's a
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lot of polling suggesting that teenagers want something to be
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done about online harm, but they're a lot more divided
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when it comes to the idea of a social media ban.
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Girl Guiding surveyed about two thousand teenagers, boys and girls
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and found that only fifteen percent of them supported the
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idea of a ban of under sixteen's on social media.
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I have YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
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These three Girls Guiding advocates traveled down to London to
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talk to me about the possibility of a social media ban.
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Five short from content is really not my phone.
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There's a case that needs to be made for changing
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the way social media is to help people because it's
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got a lot of dangers from the on one ered
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explicit and violent content, bullying on their spinner major issue,
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But I don't think about as the issue. Someone in
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their thirties isn't going to want to say the violent
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content that teenagers are seeing, so it's not solving the issue.
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You can't restrict the entirety of the Internet. That's impossible
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and easily. Young people are so tex savvy nowadays, especially
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even more so than the parents and people who should
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be the ones looking after them. They'll be able to
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find places to search things they maybe shouldn't be looking out,
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to find violent images, explicit images, things like that.
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A lot of companies they need to be held responsible
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for how they're doing, how they're like putting all this
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stuff out there, because at the end of the day,
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they're the ones allowing it. We're just the ones who
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seeing this stuff. If we put a band then that's
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just saying we're the problem, it's our fault, when actually
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it's their algorithms. It's the way that they've made their platforms.
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I'm in King's Cross and I've just heard that a
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load of young protesters have put up signs on billboards
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and bus stops around central London all about social media
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and the impact that it has. So I'm going to
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go see if I can find some of them. The
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adverts were put up by a group called Mad Youth Organize.
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A day later they went and blocked the doors of
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Meta's London HQ.
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I think social media can be an amazing place. As
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a young teen, it was somewhere that I found like
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community and connection. It can be a brilliant form of
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self expression as a young person. I am not in
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support of the social media band. I can understand where
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it comes from, and you know, we do need to
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be thinking about safety, but for me, that looks like
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safety by design. A social media ban kind of lets
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matter off the hook to magis organize. We're calling for
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a missery tax, and that's basically a four percent tax
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on corporations such as matters profits and that can be
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used to fund beneath mental health services which are like
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chronically underfunded and understretched in this country.
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Instead of a ban, I think we should take a
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nuanced approach, really a two pronged approach. The first is
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invest in digital literacy education. I think one of the
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things that I find problematic about a ban is that
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it seems to postpone the problem, right, so you can't
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use social media until you're sixteen. Also, in UK we're
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going to lower the voting age to sixteen, So there's
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this incoherence that we think that teens are somehow adult
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enough to vote but not adult enough to be on
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social media. And if you're not on social media, they're
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going to be on social media for the first time
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that they're also going to be voting for the first time.
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It could be a dangerous sort of cliff edge scenario.
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So I think we need to prepare teens from as
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early as the age. And then the other pillar is
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really regulation and safety by design principles. So what I
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mean by that is we should force social media companies
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to design products that are safe for kids.
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My preference, and unless there is evidence to the country
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which comes through, is that we find ways to design
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the platforms to make sure that young people can be protected,
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their wellbeing can be supported, and that they can get
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the help they need that we don't drive them to
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places where the information may be problematic.
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I think it's worth saying after all of that that
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it's still quite hard to know where to stand on
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a social media ban. I've spent months talking to families
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in unimaginable pain because they've lost children because of something
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harmful that they're seen online. I've spent numerous days in
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court listening to how yet another person has been abused online.
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I've covered sextortion cases, suicide cases, abuse cases, all happening
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on social media. So it's really easy to understand how
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people have just come to the point where they say,
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we just need to block it we just need to
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take the UK's children off social media, but it's also
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really important to look at what would work and what
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would help the children that we're talking about. The introduction
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of social media is sometimes described as a big societal experiment,
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so maybe now is when we start experimenting with the
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solutions
1
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You might be about to ban millions of people from
2
00:00:02.200 --> 00:00:08.199
social media based solely on vibes. UK seems to be
3
00:00:08.240 --> 00:00:10.640
gunning for a social media ban at the moment, and
4
00:00:10.720 --> 00:00:14.160
the government seems to be preparing the ground for that ban.
5
00:00:14.599 --> 00:00:17.600
The media, myself included, have spent a lot of time
6
00:00:17.960 --> 00:00:20.199
talking about how that would work and speaking to the
7
00:00:20.239 --> 00:00:24.199
people that understandably want to ban the UK's children from
8
00:00:24.239 --> 00:00:27.039
social media. So we're going to look at the why
9
00:00:27.120 --> 00:00:29.960
not the case against a ban and speak to the
10
00:00:29.960 --> 00:00:32.200
people because there are a lot of them that are
11
00:00:32.280 --> 00:00:37.399
arguing that a ban isn't a good idea. Logically, the
12
00:00:37.479 --> 00:00:40.240
first thing to do when you're thinking about introducing sweeping
13
00:00:40.280 --> 00:00:43.240
and nationwide restrictions is to look at the evidence.
14
00:00:43.399 --> 00:00:46.880
There is, i would say zero evidence to support the
15
00:00:46.880 --> 00:00:47.960
efficacy of a band.
16
00:00:48.359 --> 00:00:50.560
The problem is there doesn't seem to be any We've
17
00:00:50.600 --> 00:00:53.079
got loads of opinion polls telling us that people want
18
00:00:53.119 --> 00:00:55.679
to ban, but nothing to say what that ban would
19
00:00:55.759 --> 00:00:56.520
actually do.
20
00:00:58.039 --> 00:01:01.079
He's one of the graphs. Actually they're done things that
21
00:01:01.119 --> 00:01:01.880
I'm talking about.
22
00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:06.640
Professor Sanda Vandalinden research is psychology at the University of Cambridge.
23
00:01:07.120 --> 00:01:11.680
What we need are population level randomized control trials to
24
00:01:11.719 --> 00:01:14.239
figure out what are the consequences of bands, who does
25
00:01:14.239 --> 00:01:15.840
it benefit and who does it harm.
26
00:01:16.200 --> 00:01:19.319
He recently published an article in the science journal Nature
27
00:01:19.680 --> 00:01:22.920
arguing there isn't enough evidence for a UK wide social
28
00:01:22.959 --> 00:01:23.480
media ban.
29
00:01:23.760 --> 00:01:26.920
Some parents reacted to that with the suggestion that you know,
30
00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:30.480
they have seen harms from social media come to their kids,
31
00:01:30.680 --> 00:01:33.879
and the social media companies aren't interested in fixing the problem,
32
00:01:33.959 --> 00:01:37.239
and so a ban is the only reasonable solution. And
33
00:01:37.280 --> 00:01:39.959
to that I would say that I fully agree that
34
00:01:40.120 --> 00:01:42.200
there can't be harms from social media and that some
35
00:01:42.280 --> 00:01:46.040
kids have been very negatively impacted. The reason why I
36
00:01:46.079 --> 00:01:48.599
don't think a ban is the right solution right now
37
00:01:49.120 --> 00:01:53.079
is because a ban also has the potential to harm
38
00:01:53.120 --> 00:01:55.760
parts of the population. Right so some parents see this
39
00:01:55.799 --> 00:02:00.239
as well, there's only benefits to a ban, But that's
40
00:01:59.879 --> 00:02:03.200
not true. You know, unlike smoking, unlike alcohol, there are
41
00:02:03.239 --> 00:02:06.200
benefits to social media. It depends on how you use
42
00:02:06.239 --> 00:02:09.240
social media, how often for what purposes. If you use
43
00:02:09.280 --> 00:02:12.879
social media for negative downward social comparisons, if you're comparing
44
00:02:12.919 --> 00:02:15.879
yourself to other people, if you're dooms growing, that's going
45
00:02:15.919 --> 00:02:17.879
to have a negative impact on your mental health. If
46
00:02:17.879 --> 00:02:20.080
you're using it to connect with friends and engage with
47
00:02:20.159 --> 00:02:22.719
social issues that might have a positive impact on your
48
00:02:22.759 --> 00:02:23.319
mental health.
49
00:02:23.599 --> 00:02:25.960
So, according to Sander, there's no evidence that a social
50
00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:28.840
media band could help teenagers, but what if it could
51
00:02:28.879 --> 00:02:31.599
harm them. I've headed back to London to find out.
52
00:02:32.159 --> 00:02:35.439
There are groups of teenagers take lgbt teenagers for example,
53
00:02:35.719 --> 00:02:39.479
who face higher levels of isolation, of bullying, of loneliness,
54
00:02:39.719 --> 00:02:43.199
and historically school and maybe home haven't been the kindest
55
00:02:43.199 --> 00:02:45.680
places for them, and then social media came along and
56
00:02:45.680 --> 00:02:46.800
they had somewhere to turn.
57
00:02:47.240 --> 00:02:50.680
Social media has absolutely been a lifeline for many LGBTQ
58
00:02:50.800 --> 00:02:54.080
plus young people. They tell us that day in day out.
59
00:02:54.680 --> 00:02:59.000
Simon Blake runs Stonewall UK. It's Europe's largest lgbt plus
60
00:02:59.080 --> 00:03:02.400
organization and it's against a social media ban.
61
00:03:02.599 --> 00:03:06.479
LGBTQ plus young people would be disproportionately affected, and the
62
00:03:06.560 --> 00:03:09.560
reason for that is that often they do not feel
63
00:03:09.560 --> 00:03:12.199
that they can talk to adults, to people in their
64
00:03:12.240 --> 00:03:14.919
peer groups, or to find helping other ways, so they
65
00:03:14.960 --> 00:03:17.240
look to the Internet to find other people like them
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or information that's available on social media.
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But this isn't a binary issue. A social media ban
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isn't the only option the UK's leading children's charity, the
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NSPCC doesn't support a social media ban, but it does
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have some fairly simple sounding alternatives to suggest.
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Soa mickey Welcome to the NSPCC's library. So, parents and
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children and young people across the country want to see
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urgent action. The reason why they're landing on a ban
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in many ways is because they just want government to
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do something. But this is a complex problem and we
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need to see a range of solutions. Firstly, we want
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to see tech companies enforce their own rules. Their terms
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and conditions say that under thirteen shouldn't be on their platforms,
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but two er point five million children and people are
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on their platforms. They could change that today. Secondly, we
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want to see targeting of addictive algorithms through legislation. Young
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people are sick of being sucked into a vortex of
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doom scrolling. They want action around that. And Thirdly, we
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want to ensure that social media platforms and platforms like
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WhatsApp have safety built in at the design of them,
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so that young people can't be sending and receiving harmful
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contents such as nud images.
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Okay, after a long time talking about teenagers, it's probably
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time we talk two s years un today. There's a
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lot of polling suggesting that teenagers want something to be
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done about online harm, but they're a lot more divided
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when it comes to the idea of a social media ban.
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Girl Guiding surveyed about two thousand teenagers, boys and girls
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and found that only fifteen percent of them supported the
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idea of a ban of under sixteen's on social media.
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I have YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
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These three Girls Guiding advocates traveled down to London to
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talk to me about the possibility of a social media ban.
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Five short from content is really not my phone.
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There's a case that needs to be made for changing
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the way social media is to help people because it's
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got a lot of dangers from the on one ered
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explicit and violent content, bullying on their spinner major issue,
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But I don't think about as the issue. Someone in
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their thirties isn't going to want to say the violent
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content that teenagers are seeing, so it's not solving the issue.
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You can't restrict the entirety of the Internet. That's impossible
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and easily. Young people are so tex savvy nowadays, especially
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even more so than the parents and people who should
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be the ones looking after them. They'll be able to
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find places to search things they maybe shouldn't be looking out,
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to find violent images, explicit images, things like that.
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A lot of companies they need to be held responsible
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for how they're doing, how they're like putting all this
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stuff out there, because at the end of the day,
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they're the ones allowing it. We're just the ones who
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seeing this stuff. If we put a band then that's
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just saying we're the problem, it's our fault, when actually
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it's their algorithms. It's the way that they've made their platforms.
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I'm in King's Cross and I've just heard that a
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load of young protesters have put up signs on billboards
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and bus stops around central London all about social media
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and the impact that it has. So I'm going to
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go see if I can find some of them. The
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adverts were put up by a group called Mad Youth Organize.
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A day later they went and blocked the doors of
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Meta's London HQ.
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I think social media can be an amazing place. As
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a young teen, it was somewhere that I found like
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community and connection. It can be a brilliant form of
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self expression as a young person. I am not in
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support of the social media band. I can understand where
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it comes from, and you know, we do need to
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be thinking about safety, but for me, that looks like
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safety by design. A social media ban kind of lets
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matter off the hook to magis organize. We're calling for
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a missery tax, and that's basically a four percent tax
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on corporations such as matters profits and that can be
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used to fund beneath mental health services which are like
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chronically underfunded and understretched in this country.
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Instead of a ban, I think we should take a
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nuanced approach, really a two pronged approach. The first is
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invest in digital literacy education. I think one of the
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things that I find problematic about a ban is that
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it seems to postpone the problem, right, so you can't
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use social media until you're sixteen. Also, in UK we're
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going to lower the voting age to sixteen, So there's
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this incoherence that we think that teens are somehow adult
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enough to vote but not adult enough to be on
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social media. And if you're not on social media, they're
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going to be on social media for the first time
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that they're also going to be voting for the first time.
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It could be a dangerous sort of cliff edge scenario.
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So I think we need to prepare teens from as
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early as the age. And then the other pillar is
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really regulation and safety by design principles. So what I
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mean by that is we should force social media companies
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to design products that are safe for kids.
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My preference, and unless there is evidence to the country
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which comes through, is that we find ways to design
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the platforms to make sure that young people can be protected,
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their wellbeing can be supported, and that they can get
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the help they need that we don't drive them to
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places where the information may be problematic.
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I think it's worth saying after all of that that
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it's still quite hard to know where to stand on
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a social media ban. I've spent months talking to families
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in unimaginable pain because they've lost children because of something
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harmful that they're seen online. I've spent numerous days in
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court listening to how yet another person has been abused online.
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I've covered sextortion cases, suicide cases, abuse cases, all happening
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on social media. So it's really easy to understand how
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people have just come to the point where they say,
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we just need to block it we just need to
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take the UK's children off social media, but it's also
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really important to look at what would work and what
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would help the children that we're talking about. The introduction
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of social media is sometimes described as a big societal experiment,
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so maybe now is when we start experimenting with the
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solutions
