| The article spends a long time conflating actual proposed policy in the UK with things that aren't being proposed and sound much worse. I did some googling, the UK's gone a bit further than the US in proposing that < 16 year olds can't use social media with real age verification instead of current "I promise I'm over 13" approaches, curfews on social media specifically for 16-17 year olds that are opt-out, and smart phones must be put away at school. No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all. > It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets. The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine" > Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society. We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade. |