Latest / The Fourcast / Should the UK ban social media for under-16s?

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Should the UK ban social media for under-16s? · The Fourcast

0:00
Hate, harm and disinformation is algorithmically prioritized
0:04
through the attention economy because disinformation is often
0:09
more attention grabbing than truth, and that is what we are
0:13
trying to protect against. The more personalized an
0:16
experience you create for an individual, the less that
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they're going to have these community moments.
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And with AI, that's going to be turbo boosted in our lifetimes
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more than we've seen it yet in the evolution of the social
0:27
media ecosystem. So.
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I know as an academic you're not taking a side on this, but as a
0:31
parent do you want a ban for your kids?
0:39
Hello and welcome to the forecast.
0:40
We're all very aware of the dangers of social media, from
0:43
doom scrolling to cyber bullying, addictive algorithms
0:47
to sexual predators. But should it be banned for
0:49
under sixteens? That is what the government is
0:52
now consulting on after Australia became the first
0:54
country to introduce a ban last month.
0:57
But will restricting young people's access to social media
1:00
really bring back what campaigners yearn for?
1:02
Carefree childhoods and youthful engagement in healthy pursuits?
1:06
And did they ever exist in the 1st place?
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And won't tech savvy children just find ways round the
1:11
restrictions anyway, given social media is so rooted in
1:14
their everyday lives? Well, to discuss all this, I'm
1:16
joined by Caitlin Regai, who's a professor of digital humanities
1:20
and author of the best seller Smartphone Nation, and the
1:23
digital journalist, author and TikTok influencer Sophia Smith.
1:26
Gala, welcome to you both. Caitlin, I want to start with
1:30
you just sending out the argument for and against banning
1:33
smartphones for under sixteens. Yeah.
1:36
So this is an issue that has really split the child advocacy
1:41
space. And The thing is really all of
1:46
these groups want the same thing for kids to be safer online, but
1:51
they disagree on how we get there.
1:54
So to one side of the argument, we have groups like Smartphone
1:57
Free Childhood and the Children's Commissioner who say
2:02
that advocacy around online safety has not been effective,
2:08
that kids are not safe online, and that these technologies are
2:13
getting increasingly more advanced and more harmful.
2:17
So we only need to look to the Children's Commissioner's report
2:21
from last summer that says that in one year, the percentage of
2:26
children who stumble across pornography by mistake has risen
2:32
from 38% to 59% in one year. So they say we tried.
2:40
It is not safe and kids shouldn't be on those platforms.
2:44
To the. Other side of the argument, you
2:47
have groups like the Molly Rose Foundation, like the NSPCC, who
2:52
say that a ban would effectively let social media companies and
2:58
legislators off the hook from actively investing in of a mode
3:05
of technology that is safe by design.
3:07
And they say that what will happen is that will in turn put
3:11
a greater onus on parents and educators to prepare kids for
3:15
when that 16th birthday comes because it will be less.
3:19
Safe. Well, Sophia, it's a, it's a
3:21
finely balanced argument and every time I hear one side of
3:23
the argument and then the other, I'm kind of convinced by both.
3:26
But there is a lot of parental support for a ban.
3:29
There's cross party support for a ban.
3:31
What's wrong with a ban? I'm sympathetic towards the
3:35
reasons behind it. We want to protect young people.
3:38
I don't think shutting people, young people out of public life
3:41
is the solution, which is an outcome, a likely outcome
3:45
because this. Is public life.
3:47
You know, we're growing up in a world that is smartphone and
3:50
connected. It's on and offline.
3:52
Our lives hold this natural duality now.
3:55
And would you say I don't want my kids sort of going out to
3:58
play anymore because it's dangerous?
3:59
You know, we want young people to socialise in a Safeway in an
4:03
age appropriate way because that's what's going to help them
4:06
become well-rounded adults. If you see, people would say,
4:08
well actually I'd rather my kids socialise in the real world
4:11
rather than online. I would.
4:13
I am very supportive of there being lots of opportunities and
4:17
activities available for young people in the offline world.
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We know that lots and lots of Youth Services have seen funding
4:24
disappear over the last few decades.
4:27
So to argue that there is this sort of well supported offline
4:30
world for young people, I think a lot of people in Youth
4:32
Services would disagree with that.
4:34
On the point of letting platforms and politicians off
4:37
the hook, I completely support that.
4:40
If you suddenly have social media platforms getting used to
4:43
the fact that, oh, it's OK, under sixteens aren't on here
4:47
anymore, we don't have to clean up our act.
4:49
A lot of the problems, a lot of the deceptive design patterns
4:52
that are on platforms aren't great for grown-ups either.
4:56
It's not just under sixteens. So is it possible from an
5:00
academic standpoint to sort of quantify the potential harms for
5:03
children online compared to something like, you know,
5:06
cigarettes, which obviously you wouldn't want to see a a young
5:09
child smoking? Right.
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And so the cigarette comparison gets used often.
5:14
Of course, it's less simplistic than a cigarette because we can
5:17
all exist without cigarettes at the moment.
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Unless you're going to be very subversive, it's very hard to
5:24
exist without the digital space. But we do not have the same
5:30
regulations we have in the digital space as we have around
5:33
other things we consume, for example, like the food we eat,
5:37
the medication we take, the cars we drive.
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We have consumer protections around those things.
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We don't have those same consumer protections in large
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part because we're not actually the consumers here.
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We're the product, or rather our time and attention is the
5:52
product. And So what child advocacy
5:56
groups are saying is if you're not going to protect our kids in
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this space, if we're not going to have that kind of duty of
6:01
care, we need to remove them from that space.
6:04
You're both making the argument that this is a natural part of
6:09
our world these days, so is there a danger if you do ban it,
6:13
Ban smartphones and social media for under sixteens that there's
6:15
a Cliff edge at 16. They're suddenly exposed to all
6:18
this stuff that they haven't got used to navigating.
6:22
Again, it's the fact that you're excluding young people from an
6:25
area in which we know many have, many have used these platforms
6:31
and tools as enormously powerful educational tools.
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So, so I'm, I'd be very worried about that being cut off for
6:41
lots of young people. And something that I don't think
6:44
people talk about very often are positive adolescences and
6:49
childhoods with social media. When I look back on my own
6:54
adolescent years, preteen years, I was very much the first social
6:58
media native generation growing up, I think.
7:01
And it looked very different to how it looks today.
7:03
I remember messaging my mates on MSN Messenger.
7:06
I can remember posting on Facebook walls, you know.
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Looking forward to 200 happy birthday messages on my Facebook
7:13
walls that. All sounds very innocent
7:14
compared to what we're looking at those.
7:15
Things have changed, and I think there are two reasons behind why
7:20
I had a largely positive experience growing up.
7:23
It would have been that I had all of the support systems in
7:26
the offline world that helped me be a happy and healthy young
7:29
person online. I had systems of privilege
7:32
around me. I had present parents with
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unconditional love, all of these things that protect a young
7:39
person and give them good self esteem.
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I had that That helped me on and offline.
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Also, this was the era of the social graph.
7:46
So primarily I was engaging on platforms with people who I knew
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in real life, who people who I wanted to be in community with
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in real life. And what's kind of happened is
7:56
platforms like TikTok, like Instagram, it's TV again.
7:59
We are watching content again. It's being served to us with a
8:04
recommendation algorithm that's hyper powerful, showing things
8:08
based on our viewing habits. We're not participating in the
8:12
same way. And that's where I think as a
8:14
user, we've lost a lot of control, right?
8:18
And that's where it comes back to to regulating big tech, for
8:21
example. So is that the third way here
8:23
rather than the ban or not a ban, you just as the Molly
8:26
Russell Foundation is advocating, you know, just make
8:29
rein in big tech, make sure that they're taking control of
8:32
harmful material that's out there.
8:35
So lots of people in this space who contributed to the online
8:39
Safety Act on I myself fed into parts of it, were disappointed
8:43
with it. We, most of these groups would
8:47
say it has not been effective. Now the debate is do you do you
8:51
essentially say it hasn't worked out, it's not safe for kids here
8:55
right now or that we should continue to work on it to make
9:00
it safer? That's the debate here.
9:03
Here's the the thing. Laws matter.
9:06
Laws matter because they are a barometer of society.
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They allow us to to say what we think is acceptable and what is
9:16
not acceptable. Even if not everyone follows
9:18
those laws, they make a statement.
9:21
At the same time, though, we want to continue to hold
9:25
legislators and big tech accountable, and we want them to
9:29
still continue to invest in robust policy, not just around
9:33
social media, but around the Internet and around AI, because
9:38
that is going to be the next issue that we deal with.
9:41
And so we want them to continue to think about this as it is
9:46
structured at the moment. It's actually not like TV.
9:48
It's very different than TV, television.
9:52
What we're doing right now has a code of conduct, and you are not
9:56
allowed to just broadcast whatever you like, right?
10:01
These companies are not classified as broadcasters.
10:04
These companies are classified as glorified indexers.
10:07
And and is. Is that what needs to change I
10:09
mean? That means that they are not
10:11
culpable for the content that they post.
10:14
So bring Big Tech to heel, you know, legislate more
10:18
effectively. Is that the answer?
10:20
There needs to be an awful lot more transparency from these big
10:23
platforms. But treat them as broadcasters.
10:27
This has. Been the decision where they
10:29
were, sort of it was decided that they were not publishers
10:33
has been a decision that only seems to have really caused
10:37
pretty extensive harm. We're not only seeing it in the
10:41
in the social media debate, it's now becoming quite prominent in
10:43
conversations around AI as well. That's right.
10:46
And that's a very old, if we get this.
10:47
So we're talking about American legislation primarily that that
10:50
is section 2:30. That is a 30 year old bill.
10:54
Keep in mind that the iPhone is is younger than 20 years old.
10:59
That comes out in 2007. So a 30 year old bill
11:02
essentially set up the idea that social media companies were not
11:06
culpable for the content that was posted on their platforms.
11:10
But there was an opportunity to change that in the online safety
11:12
bill here. Yeah, and it's already.
11:14
Been outrun. You see happening in the United
11:16
States around that at this very moment.
11:20
But they're winning the argument.
11:21
Big Tech is outrunning the legislators.
11:23
Yeah, that this is and this is where we are.
11:27
If you have regulation that ultimately can't do its job in
11:32
holding the powerful, even the overpowerful, accountable, then
11:37
you have to ask, is regulation the answer?
11:40
And every debate that seems to happen when it comes to social
11:44
media comes down to that. But you know, the argument that
11:47
people advocating for a ban have is that while we're arguing
11:50
about this and we're arguing about whether the laws are are
11:52
correct or not. And you know, the government's
11:54
now consulting on this and it's a short consultation.
11:57
They're consulting on whether on on what to do rather than
12:00
whether to do it. But Even so, the risk, there's a
12:02
risk in delay, isn't there? That's.
12:04
Absolutely right. So as an academic, I think we
12:07
should continue to push for safety by design.
12:09
But as a mother, my kids are living this right now.
12:16
Their childhood is happening now and it's not a safe space for
12:20
them. And so you as a.
12:21
Parent and it is incrementally less safe and I think the point
12:26
made about the fact that the Internet 10 years ago was a very
12:31
different space is is absolutely correct when we think about the
12:34
heyday of social media when we talk about digital activism in
12:39
citizen journalism in 2011 and in 2012 that was a very
12:44
different technology that we were dealing with.
12:46
So this town square, as proposed by Elon Musk only makes is only
12:53
actual if everyone has an equal space on that square, and that
12:58
is not the case. So I know as an academic you're
13:00
not taking a side on this, but as a parent, do you want a ban
13:03
for your kids? I will say this again, as an
13:06
academic, I believe we should continue to fight for a better
13:11
Internet. As a mom, I want my kids to be
13:14
safe. And So what I think we need to
13:16
do is think much more holistically about this, where
13:19
we create a law that draws a line in the stand about where we
13:25
stand as a society, whilst at the same time putting in some
13:30
kind of implement a way of implementing, holding
13:35
legislators accountable for continuing to work.
13:39
So it's a problem with a band. Yeah.
13:41
Because the problem with a Band-Aid solution is that people
13:46
will think that the job is done and then there's going to be
13:48
this huge onus on schools that have to prepare kids for this,
13:51
on parents that have to prepare kids for this.
13:55
I mean how easy would it be for kids to get round a ban anyway?
13:57
What are we seeing in Australia? Oh, I mean, young people are
14:02
really good at this. I myself was once someone under
14:06
the age of 13 on platforms. I had to be 13 and over, right?
14:10
So this was me. Young people will find a way to
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get around it. And thinking particularly about
14:18
the the challenges that teachers face.
14:21
I used to do a lot of work in the sex education and media
14:24
literacy space and you always see teachers really desperate
14:28
for better training and resources around online harms,
14:32
educating and protecting young people around online harms.
14:35
So we're we're not beginning all of this with a head start.
14:38
We're really quite far behind in dealing with it as a as a
14:41
problem and in order to fix it. You can't magic all of the
14:46
funding right here right now. As you've been saying, children
14:50
are in school right now. There are children who are on
14:52
social media right now. How do you deal with it as and
14:53
when? I certainly, I certainly what I
14:58
do really believe in and is something that if a parent is
15:02
watching and they can do today is if they feel like there is
15:05
what I would describe as a digital gap between them and
15:09
their children. So if they feel like they don't.
15:12
Understand. Snapchat, yeah, might be using
15:15
apps or tools that are just a total mystery to you.
15:18
I think a really good investment with with an hour in the next
15:21
week is you figuring out how these platforms work.
15:24
Well, let's talk a little bit about parents because you said
15:26
as a parent, you know, you wanted this third way that
15:28
you've set out. Do you think that there is a
15:31
sort of moral panic among parents that you know, akin to
15:35
how people used to worry about their kids getting too much TV
15:38
or something in the past? You will hear people call this
15:43
moral panic and I understand where that comes from.
15:46
I do kind of on a personal level believe there is a lot of moral
15:50
panic around this, but it really does come from a good place like
15:53
it. It comes from people very fairly
15:57
worrying about the health and well-being of the young people
16:00
in their lives and indeed any vulnerable people in their
16:03
lives. Who you know.
16:06
The evidence base for all of this things are still emerging.
16:10
It's a lot of correlation doesn't mean causation.
16:13
That comes up a lot in in in these early studies.
16:17
And I think what we do already know is that if if you're
16:22
someone who who is vulnerable, you're probably going to have
16:26
more negative experiences with social media than someone who
16:28
perhaps doesn't have those vulnerabilities.
16:30
That's right. OK, so this causation debate
16:33
that we don't fully know the causal evidence.
16:36
This is essentially saying that we should wait until we know for
16:39
sure, for sure, for sure that is causing harm before we pull
16:42
something off the market, which is kind of different from
16:44
everything else in our society. What my research and with my
16:49
team points to is the way in which hate, harm, and
16:53
disinformation is algorithmically prioritized
16:56
through the attention economy or the algorithmic economy because
17:01
it is more attention grabbing. Because disinformation is often
17:06
more attention grabbing than truth.
17:08
Like gossip? Yeah.
17:09
And harm or things that hook into our insecurities often hold
17:13
us there just a little bit longer.
17:15
And it's that extra time, that extra attention that advertisers
17:19
are paying for. And so when we talk about harm,
17:23
and that harm will be different for every person, you might
17:25
think about self harm. You might think about the fact
17:28
that we were never meant to look at our faces as much as we do.
17:31
You might think about the way it's changed sex and
17:33
relationships. But whatever we mean by that
17:36
individual form of harm, what we know is, is that these
17:41
algorithms push us into more extreme versions of self, and
17:47
that is what we are trying to protect against.
17:50
And so this argument about a Cliff edge coming at at at 16
17:55
may in fact be the case. And what some people will say is
17:58
it's better for that to happen at 16, to give children a few
18:02
more years to mature before they have to reach that point.
18:06
What the thinking about the algorithm brings us back to the
18:09
the third way of not banning or not banning, but curbing the the
18:13
tech companies. I mean, what would work on that?
18:16
Is it tougher age verification? Is it, you know, limiting
18:20
addictive features? What in your view might work?
18:26
It's really difficult because of the financial incentives that
18:29
platforms have to kind of not listen to any of us.
18:32
They're always going to make money.
18:35
Well, it feels, certainly feels that way, doesn't it, that
18:36
they're always going to make money out of effectively
18:38
exploiting lots of their users with practices that are not
18:41
transparent and are economically incentivized to promote harm.
18:46
Disinformation. I my biggest prediction for the
18:50
next few years is that we're going to see sort of increasing
18:55
activism around this. We're going to see increasing
18:58
attempts grassroots to build different tech.
19:02
It hasn't worked so well with Blue Sky, has it?
19:05
It hasn't. I mean, I am a video first
19:08
journalist and obviously I'm not going to look at a text based
19:12
platform and think that that is the solution to our problems in
19:15
2026. What I do think is that we're
19:18
probably going to see a lot of many more grassroots attempts
19:23
where people are going to try and build platforms themselves.
19:27
Now, it's incredibly difficult to build a social media
19:29
platform. That's why it's only the mega
19:31
wealthy and the mega powerful who have done it.
19:34
And it's monetizing that and how?
19:36
You do that and I, I do wonder in the era of the, the great AI
19:41
vibe code, whether now finally kind of the little people, the
19:45
normal people and the people who really do want a better tech
19:49
future are now finally in a position to think, you know
19:52
what? We've given the platforms ample
19:54
opportunity to clean up their act.
19:57
If they're not going to do it, we're moving.
20:00
What what might work in terms of curbing big tech as an
20:03
alternative to to banning or not banning so.
20:06
Just to be clear, I don't exclude banning from this third
20:10
wave. I just want to make sure that we
20:12
include more into that. So the problem often with
20:16
banning is where do we set up the parameters?
20:18
If you look at the initial ban that Australia proposed, it
20:21
didn't include YouTube. Now YouTube is far and above the
20:26
most used platform by kids. A new Pew Research study says
20:30
that 89% of kids from the age of five are on YouTube algorithm.
20:36
It's an algorithmically driven unregulated platform.
20:39
That's very different than watching regulated children's
20:43
programming. And so we need to decide, OK,
20:46
what are the parameters? What do we mean by a ban?
20:50
And then how are we going to support educators and parents
20:56
around that? And at the same time, what can
20:59
we put in place to hold legislators accountable, to
21:03
continue to work on tech safety, to not think that the job is
21:08
done because it will not be done.
21:10
But at the moment, like it is not a safe space for kids.
21:14
We have to acknowledge that. And how do we acknowledge that?
21:19
How do we actually remove kids who are living right here, right
21:22
now off of that while we continue to figure it out for
21:26
kids in the future? And to that point, tech always
21:29
move so much faster than regulation and legislation.
21:33
So if you take for example, Substack, Substack is now trying
21:37
to market itself as a social media platform.
21:39
Now, when it first came onto the scene, we would have only
21:42
associated it as being a newsletter platform.
21:45
It's almost been used like X now, isn't?
21:48
It yeah, so so all of a sudden some policy maker at some point
21:52
has to decide, oh, that now fits the bill as a social media
21:55
platform. And so many apps and services
22:00
have a social element to the point that it it it basically
22:04
becomes impossible to fully govern these parameters.
22:07
Do you think this consultation on a on a ban feels very
22:10
performative that, you know, reacting to maybe a moral panic,
22:14
you know, talking about big tech always outpacing lawmakers, Are
22:18
they sort of jumping on a bandwagon effectively?
22:21
I think that's very likely. I also think the UK government
22:27
could not have necessarily asked for a better experiment than
22:31
what's happened in Australia because that can effectively be
22:34
looked at as a pilot. So if.
22:37
How's that pilot going? I mean, it's very early.
22:40
We, we, it's, it's very hard to say at this stage.
22:43
But what it does send is a message to where they stand as a
22:47
society, which I think is really important.
22:49
We also have to keep in mind what this does to adult mental
22:53
health and well. Being I was about to say we've
22:54
been talking about parents and parents supporting this ban.
22:57
How are parents doing on their addictive addiction to social
23:00
media? So we as adults are not immune
23:03
to the this social media addiction.
23:05
We are not immune to becoming polarized and moving deeper and
23:10
deeper into our own echo chambers.
23:12
And of course, yes, a lot of these platforms are being used
23:16
in the household from a very early age.
23:18
In fact, a lot of these kids have been shared on social media
23:22
from their very earliest moments.
23:24
We know from Barclays Bank that that 2/3 of identity theft in
23:30
the future they predict will be carried out against children
23:35
currently being shared by their parents.
23:37
Because a birthday post, the street you grew up on, your
23:41
family pet name are maybe the only things you need to commit
23:45
bank fraud. So we need to attack the way
23:48
that we are, you know, using it. As parents we talked about
23:51
fobbing, that is phone snubbing phone usage in front of our
23:55
children and what that's doing to their socialization and also
23:59
ways in which we want to be modelling these behaviours.
24:02
Yes, it's the best thing you can do as a parent actually to take
24:05
action to put your phone away, particularly at meal times, so.
24:10
So for first of all, we want to be, you know, creating
24:13
boundaries. I love analog lifestyle, where
24:16
you're becoming much more intentional about where you use
24:18
tech and where you don't, becoming much more empowered in
24:21
our usage, and also deciding that you want to game your
24:27
algorithm, that you want to be in control of these processes.
24:30
Using the algorithm it's great. Right.
24:32
You know, yeah, yeah. And that you want to essentially
24:35
be, you know, raising empowered, informed digital citizens.
24:41
That's what I talk a lot about in Smartphone Nation.
24:43
You know how we actually effectively do that.
24:46
Is there a hypocrisy here that parents are wanting to ban this
24:48
for their kids? They're doing a rubbish job at
24:51
taking control of their own social media and phone usage.
24:54
Thinking especially of putting pictures of your kids up Willy
24:58
nilly onto social media, that is very bad digital hygiene.
25:03
But how can we blame parents when they were possibly at
25:06
school at a time where you would have never had a curriculum
25:10
telling you these weren't good things to do?
25:12
And millennial and Gen. X parents, we grew up being told
25:18
that you share your success on social media.
25:20
That is how you celebrate your success.
25:22
And what is a better indicator of our success than our
25:25
children? Of course.
25:27
But the technology has changed a lot since we first started.
25:33
As users. We have to acknowledge that it's
25:35
much more sophisticated now. It is much more manipulative
25:39
now. And so new rules, both on a
25:43
personal level but also at a national level, need to come
25:47
into effect. How do you reach parents?
25:50
One of the ways to do it is through the media.
25:52
It's through high quality, engaging storytelling where
25:55
things like this can have awareness raised about it.
25:58
So it's it, it's very difficult. It can feel like you can, you
26:02
can lose adults once they turn 18 and they leave the education
26:05
system and what opportunities do you have to, to talk about
26:08
things like, hey, I know it feels nice to put this picture
26:12
up. Here's why you may not want to
26:13
do it, but there, there are ways to reach adults.
26:17
We've. Talked about protecting children
26:20
from what's going on online. What is an ideal childhood?
26:23
Was it ever ideal in the pre social media days?
26:27
So I think you're absolutely right that it's easy to look
26:30
back nostalgically at childhood's past.
26:35
What we what? We did have was a very different
26:37
relationship to screens. You know the the screens that we
26:40
I didn't. Have a telly, OK?
26:43
You had a really different relationship to screen.
26:45
Very different relationship to screen, but even if you did,
26:48
that would have been a very different choice your parent was
26:51
making because that would have been a regulated space.
26:54
So one thing I like to talk about now is that if we, you
26:57
know, this old fashioned guidance, screen time guidance
27:01
that is limiting the dosage of screen consumption to one to two
27:04
hours a day is, is quite outdated.
27:06
Lots of experts agree it's outdated because that guidance
27:09
was based on quantity, not on quality.
27:12
And So what we try and do now is, where possible, move our
27:17
screen consumption away from personalized usage, personalized
27:22
siloed device usage into more collective usage.
27:26
So I say bigger is better. Big screens in communal spaces
27:30
generally better than little screens in isolation.
27:33
But do you think parents have forgotten how risky the the real
27:36
world was, you know, in, in years gone by and they're sort
27:39
of seeing the harms of the online world in a completely
27:43
different category when actually there are a lot of parallels.
27:47
I'm not so sure about that. I think I think parents are
27:49
right to be really worried about the algorithmic environment that
27:52
has been created today. And I think a lot of them will
27:56
feel worried and concerned partially because they don't
27:59
necessarily know what the right that there is the right thing to
28:02
do. I don't even think there is one
28:05
prescriptive right way of doing things.
28:08
I still think that parents are different, just as young people
28:11
are different and young people are going to sort of respond to
28:13
things in different ways. They're going to find themselves
28:15
in different communities, different on and offline groups.
28:18
So I don't even think it's always A1 size fits all
28:21
solution. Is there actually a parallel
28:23
with the sort of problems that society's got in the real world
28:27
offline and what we seeing online?
28:29
So the same sort of divisions, the same sort of fracturing of
28:32
communities, really it's one and the same problem.
28:36
I mean, I, I, I think the digital space has increased that
28:40
fracturing. I mean, this, this kind of
28:43
space, I, I think the space of collectivity and connectivity,
28:47
the beautiful part of the Internet, you know, lest we
28:51
forget, you know, before social media, it was very hard to have
28:56
a platform to speak from before. You know, you could hope we
28:59
would get invited on your show or you could write a letter to
29:03
the editor of a newspaper. But for the most part, for most
29:06
people, they did not have the same platforms to speak from
29:09
before. The thing is, as this technology
29:12
has become more sophisticated, the beautiful things that you
29:15
would have experienced while you were growing up, this idea of
29:18
collectivity and connectivity has moved more towards isolation
29:23
and fragmentation. And so we have to acknowledge
29:26
that it is a different social media that most young people are
29:30
on now than the one that you may have experienced.
29:32
The more personalized an experience you create for an
29:35
individual, the less that they're going to have these
29:38
community moments that you've just been describing.
29:40
And with AI, that's going to be turbo boosted in our lifetimes
29:44
more than we've seen it yet in the evolution of the social
29:47
media ecosystem. So people increasingly are going
29:49
to get more and more personalized experiences on
29:52
their phone to the point it's already present today that
29:57
someone you're obsessed with following online who who youth
30:00
is on your feed everyday. And if you saw them in the
30:02
street, you'd be really excited to the next person.
30:05
They've never even heard of them.
30:07
You know, it's shifted our concepts of fame.
30:09
It's shifted concepts of news people are now getting it will
30:13
feel like they're getting different news to each other.
30:16
And and that's that's only the beginning of what is going to
30:19
happen. And if we all get very, very
30:21
personalized AI curated for you experiences, we are going to
30:29
lose a lot of common threads that are connective tissue in
30:31
this society. It's a.
30:32
Bit of a chicken and egg though, isn't it?
30:33
What came first, The sort of social media fracturing or the
30:36
fracturing in the in the offline world?
30:40
I, I think that when we moved from the social graph to the
30:45
content graph, platforms recognised Tik Tok's emergence
30:50
was part of this. It's why everything has become
30:51
short form video. It's because they all looked at
30:53
TikTok, how fast it had grown in downloads, how much money it was
30:56
making and all the platforms thought, oh, I want a bit of
30:58
that. And the reason that it worked so
31:01
well is because because you were being shown things that you're
31:04
interested in watching as opposed to the content of people
31:07
that you followed, it trapped you in the experience for
31:10
longer. If you are trapped in the
31:12
experience for longer, more money can be made out of you
31:15
because of ad revenue, so they profit more from this.
31:18
Sophia brought up AI here. And I think that's really
31:21
important that we do discuss this, that we can look at social
31:24
media or perhaps the failures of social media regulation as a
31:29
case study that we can apply to AI.
31:33
And I think we should be really doing this.
31:37
There have been tremendous failures.
31:40
We have let young people down around social media, and we can
31:45
now apply that learning to AI policy reform to be setting up
31:50
guardrails around AI. You think that this is a problem
31:54
like AI is going to be? Huge.
31:57
When we think about the social, emotional, cognitive deskilling
32:01
of young people as a result of AI.
32:03
So I think we need to take this really, really seriously to
32:06
basically set a precedent for how we want the future of
32:11
technology regulation to look. Final thought, we're also
32:14
starting to see higher adoption from young people when it comes
32:16
to AI chat bots. So something I'm very nervous
32:19
about is another digital gap emerging between young people
32:22
and their parents. Not only is it Snapchat and
32:25
TikTok that you don't get, it's it's an AI agent that your kids
32:28
now using all the time. We need to narrow some of these
32:30
digital gaps. Sophia Smith Gayla and Caitlin
32:33
Reggae, thank you both very much for joining us.
32:36
That is it for this episode of the podcast.
32:38
Until next time, goodbye.