AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
Back in the day, behind the bike shed was the place for experimentation or secrets. Today it’s in bedrooms, with thumbs working overtime. It was hard enough being a teenager then, picked upon or bullied if you weren’t popular, good at games or attractive enough. Now anyone, anywhere, can attack your self-image, encouraged by the disinhibition and anonymity of the internet.
When you ask that distorting mirror, “which is the fairest of us all?”, the poisoned apple there acts far more swiftly than any wicked stepmother in a fairy tale.
The risk of that poison is not going unchallenged. Australia became the first country to ban social media for under-16s on December 10. “Social media is doing harm to our kids, and I’m calling time on it,” PM Anthony Albanese told parents. As though to underscore the need to police what the tech giants are doing to young people, a new report showed that if 18-to-25-year-olds were given a week’s break from social media, their anxiety and depression reduced.
Should we follow Australia and introduce a blanket ban on social media accounts for platforms like Snapchat, X, Facebook and Reddit for children under a certain age? The Government has the matter under consideration and is currently trialling an age-verification wallet to be integrated with the myGov.ie system as part of a European-wide plan.
Is total prohibition enforced by law the answer, should tech companies be made responsible or should it be up to parents to police their children’s usage? The legal age of consent for sex is 17; the age for buying or consuming alcohol in public is set by law at 18. We don’t allow untested under-17s out on roads in cars, so why should we expose children’s minds to adult content on the internet?
The counter-argument goes that children are bound to find a way around a ban, which only increases the attraction of social media, and that they have to learn how to use the internet, so much a part of life today, safely. Why not limit under-16s to ‘dumb phones’ and let them have smartphones later? More than 70% of 12-year-olds and a quarter of six-year-olds in Ireland have smartphones.
Is it time to give our children back their childhood, as Albanese said? The harm that can be done by social media and access to adult material is no longer in doubt, and it has a greater impact on young girls than on boys. Mental health issues include depression, anxiety, distorted body image, eating disorders and risky behaviour.
Young teenagers can also be exposed to cyberbullying, sexploitation, grooming and misogynistic material. Then there is the economic cost, for instance treating a teenager with an eating disorder, which can take years. There is also the psychological impact of the web on teens at a stage when they are undergoing identity formation: experimenting and pushing the limits.
Cyber psychologist Mary Aitkin, author of The Cyber Effect – on how human behaviour changes online – is in favour of a tiered developmental model rather than a blanket ban. “It’s not a parent issue, it’s a health issue,” Dr Aitkin said on RTÉ radio last month. “Parents can’t compete with billion-dollar global platforms. In less than a decade, a global uncontrolled experiment has shifted children from play in the real world to play in algorithmic fields that have never been tested for safety.”
Social media platforms’ standards are meant to allow accounts for over-13s. These should be enforced and regulated with online age verification, maintains Dr Aitkin, while 13–16-year-olds should have restricted access with parental involvement.
This graduated approach seems more realistic than a blanket ban. Personally, I feel that online regulations need to be supported by strong educational measures and parental guidance. If children don’t learn the harm caused by cyberbullying or how to distinguish inappropriate content, those harms may be carried on into adult life.
Consider the online abuse of people in public life, particularly women, the rise in misogyny, incitement to racial hatred and violence. How much of the rise in domestic violence and sex attacks is partly attributable to social media influence? This is not only a health issue but a moral one.
