Saint Paul, in his first letter to the church at Corinth, wrote that he had become “all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some”. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, this is not as easy as it sounds. By attempting to appeal to everyone, Keir Starmer has, instead, appealed to no one.
It has been reported that the Prime Minister is considering implementing a ban on the use of social media accounts for children under the age of 16 — similar to that which has recently been introduced in Australia. The Australian ban would require ten of the most popular social media platforms operating in the country to prohibit children under 16 from accessing the site, lest the platforms face fines of up to the equivalent of £25 million.
The justification for such a ban is at least serious: social media is harmful for children, exposing them to grim phenomena that their young, impressionable minds could benefit from not seeing. It leads to exposure to pornography, warped views on relationships, harmful influencers, bullying, and so on. This is all broadly inarguable.
Yet the Labour Government has also committed itself to lowering the voting age to 16, largely because it has long been assumed that such a move would favour left-leaning outcomes.
This creates a stark and insurmountable problem. The public square has migrated online, especially for younger demographics. Where older generations have received much of their information from television, radio, and print, those who grew up with the internet and, importantly, smartphones, increasingly encounter news and current affairs on social media, even incidentally.
Ofcom’s latest research on news consumption found that 70 per cent of people use the internet for news, more than any other platform; 51 per cent of people polled use social media for news consumption, which is now more than print or radio. For 16-24-year-olds, social media is the victor, with 75 per cent of that demographic using social media for news.
If Labour were to implement a social media ban similar to that of Australia, children’s exposure to political content would largely be delayed until after they have already been given the franchise. A social media ban could produce an entire demographic of voters who have never used or experienced the primary environments through which some of their peers, siblings, family members, and educators engage with local, national, and international issues.
Political discourse in the digital age is shaped by arguments first posited on social media. The posting-to-policy pipeline (which was discussed in a recent episode of the new Critic Show, available on all good podcast-streaming platforms!) is a good thing — topics and issues that gain the most attention on social media are, clearly, the topics and issues on which people feel most strongly. To exclude the youngest voters from having participated, even implicitly, in such discourse while expecting them to make informed decisions about which political representatives would best favour them is farcical.
The social media ban, when paired with a newly enfranchised demographic, poses a clear contradiction, in that the same group of people who are too infantile and malleable to be allowed to use social media are simultaneously adult enough as to be able to contribute to deciding upon who governs the country. It is a ridiculous notion.
A party which would seek to simultaneously infantilise and enfranchise young people only reveals that, like its leader, it believes in nothing at all
This ban comes in the context of a Labour Government whose placement in the opinion polls is sinking faster than RMS Titanic, and which is increasingly afraid of the possibility of a right wing surge at the next election. The politicians in the United Kingdom today who achieve the most cut-through on social media with the general population — Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Robert Jenrick — are all to the right of anything that we saw in the previous Parliament. Farage is by far the most popular UK politician on TikTok, having more followers on the platform than the combined total of every other MP. His social media consultant, 24-year-old Jack Anderton, argues that Starmer is far too boring and inauthentic to appeal on that platform and, by extension, to younger people.
The social media ban, then, might have less to do with actually safeguarding children, and more to do with a last-ditch effort from a Labour Party floundering in a country that no longer wants them in charge. If Sir Keir truly believes that children under the age of 16 require protection from the pressures of the digital public square — as well they might — then he should abandon the fiction that they are ready to choose who should wield political power. A party which would seek to simultaneously infantilise and enfranchise young people only reveals that, like its leader, it believes in nothing at all.
