Something Must Be Done!

 BY LES MAY

I don’t use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, TikTok etc, but it’s difficult not to hear the complaints from parents about the ‘harm’ being done to their teenage offspring by ‘Social Media’. Raking over someone else’s misery following a tragedy is always a good story for the mainstream media which runs stories along the lines of ‘Something must be done’. Politicians set up their committees in Parliament and wag their finger at Twitter, Facebook etc, but nothing happens. And if these big companies have their way, nothing ever will.

My own attitude has always been, ‘If these platforms are so harmful to your darling children, why on earth do you buy them a smartphone or give them a computer to use in their bedroom?’ In other words I am not brimming with sympathy when something unpleasant happens.

But stupid parents and my lack of sympathy for them, does not mean there is no case for trying to protect children from harm. The key word here is ‘children’. There are already plenty of precedents for doing just that. We try to prevent children from having sex before the age of sixteen, we won’t allow them to go into a pub and drink alcohol until they are eighteen, the same age as it becomes legal to make or view an image of them naked. In each case the assumption is that before the specified age the action will be ‘harmful’. The evidence that all of these thing are actually harmful isn’t overwhelming, it’s just that ‘all right thinking people’ say they are.

The advantage of using this widely accepted precautionary approach to protecting children is that the big media companies cannot use the argument that there is no proof that whenever a tragedy occurs it was a direct consequence of the child using one or other of these platforms.

This is essentially the case presented by Ross Douthat in a long article headed ‘Instagram should just be for adults’ which appeared in Wednesday’s New York Times. ‘Don’t get involved in arguments with these companies about whether what they offer is doing harm to teenagers and younger children, just tell them it is illegal to allow a someone under the age of 16 or 18 to use them and put the onus on the companies to police it’.

Parents would like this because it would allow them to offload responsibility for their children’s well being onto someone else. The companies would whinge about the difficulty of doing it, but given that Facebook can have up to 4000 snippets of data on account holders, which enable the company to build a detailed profile of an individual user, it should not be too difficult to spot that someone is too young to have an account.