X and other platforms can be vital sources of unfashionable information and dissenting opinions
In these otherwise highly politically polarised times, there is one issue that has breached the partisan divide and enjoys strong backing from across the political spectrum: a social media ban for under-16s. Labour Ministers are considering imposing a ban, Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch has been vociferous in her support for a ban, and when not busy bungee jumping for attention, Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey found the time to call for “some kind of ban” for under-16s.
Amidst the increasing clamour for a ban, the Prosperity Institute recently held a debate on the question, and in attendance was the former Conservative MP Miriam Cates, who has long made the case for a ban, including in these pages. She posed a question which summarises the conservative case for a ban on political and cultural grounds, reproduced below:
As conservatives, we believe that culture is the means by which we transmit what we see as important, and yet social media is now the predominant culture in which our children exist […] Social media is an anti-culture, it prioritises anti-virtue, all the kinds of horrible, harmful anti-character behaviours that we don’t want our children to have. If we don’t have any restrictions, any age gate on social media, how does the panel propose that in future we transmit the kind of culture and virtue that we in this room all find so important?
Cates’ sentiment is an understandable one, especially for parents of her generation who had no experience of social media during their own adolescence. Social media can seem like a virtual Wild West, where all sorts of dangerous and subversive content is served to kids otherwise shielded by a carefully constructed lacuna of their conservatively minded parents’ making. It can seem like a dangerous vector for the Woke Mind Virus, as X owner Elon Musk describes it, to sneak into conservative households, undermining the attempts by parents like Cates to instil the next generation with the proper culture and virtue they would hope to nourish. All sorts of anti-conservative ideas — be they on gender, the authority of the family, the legitimacy of the nation, relations between the sexes, racial disparities, historical narratives, and so on — are constantly beamed to kids through the social media they use.
But the emphasis on social media as the threat to bringing up a new generation of well-formed, broadly conservative citizens relies on a misunderstanding of where Britain is today, and the kind of culture in which its children are growing up. Britain’s culture-forming institutions are no longer run by paternalistic conservatives, working to instil solid moral virtues in kids when they are not under their parents’ auspices. Instead, those institutions that are most important in forming Britain’s next generation are almost universally captured by ideologues with deeply held anti-conservative views, often just as extreme as anything that might be found online. When kids are at school, visiting museums, watching films or television, or getting a cultural education by any other mainstream means, the likelihood is that the worldview presented to them is uniformly of an anti-conservative disposition, and not of the sort that Cates believes kids would revert to if only they were yanked off of social media.
In fact, the effect of introducing a social media ban would likely have the opposite effect on changing the views of young people in the way that Cates intends. Within this broader anti-conservative cultural hegemony, social media is one of the last refuges where kids might be exposed to ideological alternatives. For those like myself, whose adolescence was already dominated by social media, it was one of the few places that offered a reprieve from the obnoxious Wokeism otherwise forced upon us at every turn in everyday life. It provided exposure to conservative ideas that were verboten in places like school or on television, often for the first time, and in many cases equipped people like me with the knowledge to form ideas independently and against the Woke hegemony young people today are otherwise brought up in.
If kids are suddenly banned from social media, they won’t then fill their time reading Roger Scruton books or volunteering at their local church. In all likelihood, they will revert to watching TV and streaming services, forced to watch shows like the BBC’s output propagandising them into believing that black people have been a continuous fixture in Britain “from the start”. If cut off from social media, then all kids would have been able to see was that nakedly ahistorical propaganda, and not its subsequent debunking and ridicule that spread across social media platforms. A ban would allow our current cultural gatekeepers near-uncontested power in shaping the minds of the young, and conservatives must remember that today that means giving power over the minds of young people to the political enemy.
A social media ban would simply be a giant own goal for conservative politics
This is not to portray social media as purely a haven of conservative and anti-Woke ideas. Dangerous and culturally subversive views can also be encountered by kids when they use social media, but the harms mostly come from conservatives having lost ground in the real world, not the virtual one. Parents are right to worry about kids being led into confusion over their gender identity due to what they encounter online, but kids were not being prescribed dangerous hormone blockers by TikTok, but by the NHS. In other words, the true harm only materialised because conservatives lost influence over Britain’s real-world institutions, allowing sectors like healthcare and education to adopt the same ideology as the most extreme corners of social media, and it was only thus that parents were defanged of their authority and their children led to serious harms.
If Cates wants to ensure that Britain transmits a virtuous culture to its next generation, then that battle ought to take place in the real world. It means trying to regain control of the country’s culturally transmissive institutions, chiefly education, but also publishing, television, film, museums, theatre and the like, ridding them of the decidedly anti-conservative ideology which currently grips them, and re-instilling them with a softly paternalistic mission of inculcating the next generation into the virtuous culture Cates seeks to defend. Rushing to ban social media without this first step would only force a whole generation to be completely in thrall to Woke hegemony, cut off from the main source offering an ideological alternative. Until such a recapturing of Britain’s institutions occurs, a social media ban would simply be a giant own goal for conservative politics. Instead, conservatives should recognise the utility of social media in allowing more young people to follow the path taken by myself and many others, away from the Woke Mind Virus we are forced to encounter through our mainstream institutions, and towards the kind of virtuous culture Cates wishes to promote.
