Sir Keir Starmer has followed Australia and today implemented a blanket ban on social media for anyone under the age of sixteen. A group of parents who had lost their children spearheaded the campaign. Whilst I obviously feel for the families who lost their children, social media is not the issue- there are many problems here.
Social media is the symptom and not the cause. It only amplifies problems that are already there. Hurt kids are hurting for a multitude of reasons. Generation Z are peer- oriented, just as Generation X were all about the rise of the individual. It’s being scapegoated, just as rock n roll was defined as “the devil’s music” in the 1950s and violent video games were blamed for society’s ills in the early noughties. Banning things simply doesn’t work. History has taught us this, time after time. How will this ban be implemented? Will kids be imprisoned, or their parents?
The parents on BBC news this morning all lost their children- some to cyber bullying, some to what they believed was because of their kids getting involved in the dark web. But if they understood internet spaces more, or actually had spoken with their children, they might have gleaned some insight into what they were all going through. I grew up with an emotionally absent father. Many of the kids at my school thought I was in a single parent family, because my dad was absent for so much of the time. I know how that screwed me up, both as a child in the eighties, and to this day. Emotional abuse it real, and it casts a long shadow.
Essentially, blaming social media is just another example of parents who are out of touch, not only with their children, who are not extensions of them and who have their own interiority, but also with how social media is not the real world, merely a tool for communicating within it. These are Orwellian times. Children need to know how to safely navigate them.
Hit The North 