A further update on media policy

 

The world of public policy typically proceeds slowly and cautiously, as it probably should. But there are some times when it moves dangerously quickly. In such moments, the reckless search for easy solutions tends to rule the day.

We seem to be in such a moment right now. Just this week (21^st April 2026), the UK government announced that it would be imposing a statutory ban on mobile phones in schools. The precise nature of the ban remains to be seen, but it will be significant step up from the non-statutory guidance that is currently provided. It’s a move that seems to ignore a good deal of the available evidence; but the change of approach was essentially forced on the government by Conservative peers in the House of Lords, whose efforts to impose such a ban were impeding the parliamentary progress of a much broader piece of legislation, the Wellbeing and Schools Bill. 

This move is part of a much broader picture, which has changed significantly since I last wrote about these issues just four months ago. The rising tide of anxiety about the impact of social media on young people has gathered extraordinary momentum. New pressure groups purporting to speak for parents – many of them with high-profile celebrity endorsers, and some with quite dubious motivations – are appearing all the time. Concerns about the online ‘manosphere’ and its role in promoting misogyny have been inflamed by TV shows like the award-winning Adolescence (which I discussed in an earlier post) and, more recently, Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere. In the US, a couple of court cases found that Meta and YouTube were guilty of promoting ‘social media addiction’ among young people, with apparently disastrous consequences. Such was the concern that a couple of weeks ago, Prime Minister Keir Starmer apparently felt compelled to summon ‘tech bosses’ to Number 10 to urge them to take action on children’s online safety: he threatened ‘stark consequences’ if they failed to do so.

The big stick Starmer appears to be grasping for is of course the prospect of a complete ban on under-16s holding social media accounts – an approach that came into force in Australia just four months ago, and is now being actively considered in a growing number of other countries. (I ran a useful interview about this with the Australian academic Michael Dezuanni, which you can find here.) Thus far, the UK government has fought shy of such a ban, for various reasons that I’ll consider below: but it is now holding a public consultation on the issue, and supporting some potentially useful research.

I’m sure that there must be media scholars who are tracking and analysing these developments in great detail. In some respects they have all the characteristics of earlier ‘media panics’: indeed, at times, they resemble the campaign against ‘horror comics’ that arose in the early 1950s, or the hysteria about ‘video nasties’ that led to the Video Recordings Act in the 1980s (both superbly documented by the late Martin Barker). This earlier work points to many questions that need to be asked here – for example, about how the ‘problem’ of young people’s relations with social media is framed and defined; about the role of conservative ‘moral entrepreneurs’ and pressure groups in dominating the public debate; and about the quality of the evidence that is used in arguing for stricter control.

The rhetoric here is also strikingly familiar. Young people are now routinely described as ‘addicted’, despite the fact that analogies with pharmacological addiction are entirely spurious. Media companies are accused of deviously conspiring to keep young people engaged with their content – a charge that might equally be levelled against any author or media producer who seeks to keep us reading or watching. Media are deemed to be guilty of causing ‘harm’, although proof of harm is extremely difficult to establish in situations (as with the US court cases) where there are many other complex factors in play. Crude measures like ‘screen time’ are manifestly unhelpful in understanding the diverse characteristics and contexts of children’s engagements with media. In all this, as always, it is children who are held to be most at risk and in need of further regulation and surveillance – which implicitly ignores the possibility that adults might be having even greater difficulty in dealing with the same issues.

And, yes, the evidence here is limited and inconclusive, despite what some campaigning American academics might say. There may be correlations between social media use and mental health problems among children, but that is not proof of any causal relationship. (And in fact, the correlations themselves have also been disputed.) At a time when there are so many other reasons why children might be suffering from mental illness, focusing attention on social media seems almost irresponsible – or perhaps it is just a convenient way of distracting attention from other problems that are seen as much too awkward to confront.

I’ve rehearsed the problems with a social media ban in previous posts. Evidence is now starting to appear from Australia that – as many of us predicted – the ban there is proving less than effective. Of course it’s early days, and we should be sceptical of such claims, but recent reports suggest that as many as two thirds of under-age children are still accessing ‘banned’ social media accounts. Subscriptions to platforms that have thus far eluded the legislation have significantly risen, as has the use of VPNs. Some of the alternatives young people may be seeking out could well prove more dangerous. Meanwhile, there has been little discussion of the longer-term consequences for children who are suddenly let loose in this seemingly frightening world at the age of sixteen, without any meaningful preparation to help them deal with it.  And of course, the platform companies are already proving adept in evading the fines that governments are attempting to levy on them, and in challenging legal constraints. Since many of them are based in other jurisdictions, it’s pretty easy for them to do so.

However, the problem here is not just about evidence, or about the likely effectiveness of any such ban. (And I should say at this point that I don’t hold with those who have argued that this isn’t actually a ban at all, because it’s the platform companies that will be prosecuted rather than children or their parents. This is just quibbling: how the ban is enacted doesn’t make any difference, it’s still a ban.)

As I’ve suggested, the key issues here are not just technical but social and political: to put this very broadly, they are to do with the wider implications of neoliberal capitalism for childhood. When it comes to media in particular, they are to do with the basic business model of the platform companies (clicks mean cash) and their failure to address why potentially problematic content may be circulating in the first place. To impose a crude ban on children holding social media accounts is to focus on symptoms rather than causes. It’s a very blunt instrument that may have unforeseen and negative consequences for those whom the campaigners claim they are seeking to protect.

. . . . .

 

So are we likely to see a ban in the UK? A year ago, I would have said no; but now I’m not so sure. Attempts by Conservative peers in the House of Lords to impose a ban have twice been rebuffed by the government; although a few months ago, no fewer than 60 Labour MPs wrote to the Prime Minister urging him to impose a ban now. The Government argues that it is observing the Australian situation, and awaiting the results from its own consultation, which should reportedly arrive in the summer. It has commissioned some interesting research, in the form of a large ‘field experiment’, which seeks to assess the effects of restricting (though not completely banning) social media use among a group of some 4000 children. This could get beyond the cause/correlation problem, but the experiment will only last for six weeks, which seems a very short time to be assessing impacts on mental health. This might appear to be a good example of cautious, evidence-based policymaking, although it remains to be seen how the evidence will be weighed against other considerations, and indeed how it will be ‘spun’ in the public debate. The results of this research will not be fully known for about a year, quite some time after the government has already said it will respond.

Of course, the elephant in the room here is the Online Safety Act, passed in 2023 but only now being gradually implemented. The Act was heralded as making the UK ‘the safest place in the world to be online’ – although (as I’ve discussed before), it would seem to fall somewhat short of such grand ambitions, and has been widely criticised on all sides. In many respects, it is indeed an elephant – a lumbering and impossibly capacious piece of legislation that many have found incapable of acting sufficiently quickly and carefully. (No disrespect to elephants here.) To impose a blanket ban on children’s social media accounts at this point would imply that the OSA isn’t working, as Sonia Livingstone has recently suggested; and while the government might want to avoid this, it is already effectively admitting as much by slipping in new provisions through the backdoor of other impending legislation, as in the case of the ban on mobile phones in schools.

Ultimately, the likelihood of any social media ban may well be tied up with the political fate of Keir Starmer himself. I’m writing amid the continuing furore over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador, and a couple of weeks before local elections that will almost certainly prove disastrous for Labour. Starmer’s personal approval ratings have hit historic lows only exceeded by Liz Truss. For a desperate Prime Minister, a social media ban might prove to be an easy populist move. Recent polling has suggested that two thirds of British adults would support such a ban (although of course responses to surveys of this kind aren’t exactly nuanced or well-informed). And campaigners are increasingly ramping up the rhetoric, arguing that action is needed right now to prevent more children being harmed, and that any delay or caution amounts to ‘failing a generation’.

. . . . .

 

Amid this rush to policy-making, it’s interesting to look at the place of media literacy. Last month, the government published its Media Literacy Action Plan for 2026-29, entitled A Safe, Informed Digital Nation. This seems to pull in a very different direction. The ministerial foreword argues (as I might have done myself) that media literacy is about more than online safety; that as well as potential risks, the digital world offers some benefits to young people in terms of ‘curiosity, creativity and connection’; and that formal education has a vital role to play here. The proposals in the document are mostly quite concrete and specific: for example, it promises a national media literacy messaging campaign (or at least a pilot for one); it offers support for funding local media, and suggests that the BBC should play an important part in promoting media literacy; and it argues that media literacy education should be strengthened in all schools (including academies), not least through teacher training. As ever, media literacy is somewhat confused here with ‘digital skills’ and ‘digital inclusion’, and dominated by the reductive idea that it’s all about ‘resilience to misleading information’; and the proposals for education focus largely on including marginal elements in the subjects of citizenship and PSHE. Nevertheless, there is a fair indication here that some people in government are starting to understand what media literacy is all about.

As the Action Plan is implemented, there will a growing need for independent critical evaluation. How many teachers, for example, are using the government-approved materials on ‘deepfakes’? Who visits the government’s Kids Online Safety Hub, and how far do they follow its advice? Who attended the rather mysterious summit event on ‘Childhood in the Age of AI’, and what did they discuss? What are the implicit assumptions that underlie such initiatives? And above all, where is media literacy actually happening in the school curriculum, how well are teachers being trained, and how effective is it?

Some useful critical questions about all this were raised in a House of Lords debate that took place on the day the Action Plan was released (the transcript can be found here – and it’s interesting reading, trust me). The debate was a response to the publication of a previous report by the Communications and Digital Committee (which I discussed briefly in an earlier post). There is a striking consensus in the debate about the importance of media literacy and of media education. Several speakers, from right across the political spectrum, make excellent points, not least about the need for media literacy to incorporate ‘critical thinking’ much more explicitly, and about the dangers of a superficial ‘knowledge-rich’ approach. In quite sharp terms, they point to the potential gap between the ‘warm words’ of the government’s Action Plan and the need for proper funding, support and implementation; and they are particularly wary of the danger that media literacy will be reduced to a merely tokenistic element of the new National Curriculum. (For the government’s part, the response of the Minister, Lord Leong, is rather less than convincing.)

In my view, there is some constructive and heartening stuff here. The question is: how does it sit alongside the much noisier and seemingly more urgent pressure to implement a ban on young people’s use of social media? To say the least, there is a contradiction here. On the one hand, the government says that it wants to empower young people to deal with the challenges and opportunities of the digital world; yet on the other, it may well end up banning them from participating in aspects of that world that they find most important and engaging. If we are seeking to prevent young people from using social media platforms and mobile devices, how might they be expected to develop and apply their media literacy? However, these are desperate times for a beleaguered government; and at such times, politicians tend to prefer blunt instruments to more well-considered and constructive approaches. We shall see.