The Evidence Is In. Britain Still Won’t Act.
Day after day I watch children and young people looking at their phones, oblivious to traffic or birdsong, not talking to friends and family, isolated from the real world to be part of an internet world. I therefore make no apology for coming back to what I consider one of the big issues of the day – how do we stop tech companies messing up our children (and often their parents!).
I have written recently about screens and children – about a rigorous Italian study showing early social media use knocks a measurable, lasting hole in a child’s learning; about Barnet’s schools finding calmer classrooms and less bullying the moment phones were locked away. This week, in the space of a few days, three things happened that hammer home the dangers our children are being exposed to: a report from England’s Children’s Commissioner, and two sets of US court proceedings that have, for the first time, forced the industry’s own internal paperwork into daylight.
On Tuesday 18 August, Dame Rachel de Souza published a report warning that a cohort of children is becoming, in her words, ‘intoxicated by extremism, radicalisation or a desire to harm others,’ and that the Prevent programme – the government’s principal tool for catching this – cannot reach them, because many show no attachment to any identifiable ideology at all. Referrals involving children have risen from 2,918 in 2016–17 to 4,715 last year; of those referred by schools, 65% are simply sent back to education when their case closes, and 93% of those never progress any further. ‘Closed doors and dead ends,’ as her report puts it. She is calling for joint Home Office and Department for Education statutory guidance to catch these children through safeguarding routes instead. She also wants the government’s under-16 social media restrictions – announced in June, with regulations not expected until December – to go further: curfews, a ban on advertising to children, limits on infinite scrolling, and a block on strangers contacting children across social media, gaming platforms and AI chatbots. Let’s hope MPs are listening to her, and force the government to act.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the industry’s own words are now making our argument for us. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable on seven counts in a case brought by the Social Media Victims Law Centre, including the central question of whether their apps were designed to be addictive, and whether the companies acted with ‘malice, oppression or fraud.’ The jury’s answer, in both cases, was yes. In the same week, a separate, two-phase trial in New Mexico reached its first verdict: $375 million in damages, after the court found Meta had misrepresented the safety of Facebook and Instagram to young users. On 7 August, phase two concluded with a further $567 million, this time on the specific question of whether Meta’s platforms constitute a public nuisance under state law. The judge’s written ruling did not mince words: ‘Just as noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air, the harmful effects of Meta’s platforms on children do not stay contained by its platforms and, instead, migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world.’ As part of the ruling, Meta must now bar push notifications to under-18s during school hours and between 10pm and 7am, delete all data held on underage users, and rein in AI chatbots that had been allowed to conduct romantic relationships with children.
On 18 August in Oakland, opening statements began in a federal case that dwarfs both of those. Attorneys general from California, Kentucky, Colorado and New Jersey – representing 60 million people between them – are seeking more than $1 trillion in damages, on the same underlying claim: that Meta built Facebook and Instagram to be addictive, knowingly, and profited from the harm that followed. The presiding judge dismissed Meta’s own proposed cap of $4 million as, in her words, ‘not even a slap on the hand.’ The case was filed in 2023. Getting it to trial has taken three years.
What has made all of this possible is discovery – the pre-trial process that forces companies to hand over their own internal records. Thousands of emails, strategy documents and internal studies that the industry spent twenty-five years insisting did not exist are now sitting in the public court record. Among them: Meta’s own staff describing so-called ‘tweens’ – children aged ten to twelve, below the legal age to even hold an account – as strategically essential to the company’s future, with one internal analysis putting a thirteen-year-old’s lifetime value to the company at $350, against as little as $200 for an older user. Employees are on record urging the company to acquire teenagers as young as it possibly could. This was not an accident, or a failure of moderation. On the industry’s own paper trail, it was the plan.
Set against all of this, look at where Britain stands. Four countries – Australia, Indonesia, Brazil and Malaysia – have already brought in national restrictions on children’s social media accounts this year. France, Greece and Türkiye have approved similar measures not yet in force. More than a dozen other countries are actively drafting their own. Britain announced its own under-16 restrictions back in June, to considerable fanfare – and the actual regulations that would make it real are still not expected until December, a full eighteen months after ministers first promised, in the words of one of them, that reform ‘has to start at primary school.’ We have made this point before: promises are cheap, and delivery has been almost entirely absent. This week’s evidence does not change that argument. It simply removes any remaining excuse for not acting on it. And keep the focus right: government keeps talking about ‘social media’, but the real issue is screens generally. Boys, in particular, are often gaming, gambling or watching pornography rather than scrolling social media specifically – and while the Italian study measured social media account age precisely, the mechanism it identifies, a phone constantly interrupting sleep, homework and attention, doesn’t care which app is open. There is no obvious reason to expect gaming or gambling apps, built on exactly the same engagement techniques, to be any less damaging.
There is a reason Cotswolds Arts Through Schools keeps returning to this territory, beyond simple outrage. Every hour a child spends being deliberately, expensively engineered into a scrolling habit is an hour not spent learning a scale on a recorder, holding a paintbrush, or standing in front of an audience for the first time. The courts in America are now establishing, as a matter of legal fact, that this was designed, not incidental. Britain’s children deserve a government that treats that fact with the urgency it deserves – not another consultation, another delayed regulation, another year of ‘intoxicated by extremism’ headlines followed by silence. This incredible experiment with our children’s brains must end. Let’s hope Burnham can show the resolve Starmer never managed.
