The newly announced ban on social media for under-16s may be politically popular, but popularity alone does not make good policy. As liberals, we should be deeply sceptical of blanket bans that restrict freedom while failing to tackle the root causes of a problem.
There is no doubt that social media can be harmful. Young people are exposed to bullying, misinformation, unhealthy content and algorithms designed to maximise engagement rather than well-being. These are serious concerns and they demand action. But the question is whether an outright ban is the right response.
I do not believe it is.
First, the proposal is likely to prove largely unworkable. Teenagers are often more technologically adept than the adults seeking to regulate them. VPNs, alternative platforms and borrowed accounts will inevitably undermine enforcement. Even child-safety campaigners have warned that a rushed ban could quickly unravel in practice.
Second, it risks creating a false sense of security. The real problem is not simply that young people are online. It is what some tech companies allow and actively promote online. Harmful content, addictive design features, endless scrolling and opaque algorithms are business choices. A ban focuses attention on children rather than on the corporations profiting from their attention. Critics have rightly argued that stronger action should be directed at platform design and algorithmic harms.
Third, social media is not universally negative. For many young people, particularly those who may suffer from social isolation and so on, it can provide friendship, community snd support that may not exist elsewhere. An outright prohibition risks cutting them off from those connections.
Liberalism is about empowering people, not simply restricting them. We should demand robust regulation of tech giants, stronger digital literacy education, tougher action against harmful content and genuinely child-friendly platform design.
The answer is to make social media safer, not to pretend we can ban young people from the online world altogether.
Parliament Must Finish the Job on Assisted Dying
The decision to reintroduce the Assisted Dying Bill to Parliament is welcome news for those who believe compassion, dignity and personal choice should matter at the end of life.
For too long, people of sound mind facing intolerable suffering have been denied the ability to make decisions about their own deaths. The proposed legislation is not about forcing anyone to choose assisted dying. It is about giving terminally ill adults, subject to robust safeguards, the right to decide for themselves how their final days will unfold. The Bill applies only to mentally competent adults with a terminal diagnosis and includes extensive protections and oversight.
This is also a question of democracy. The previous Bill secured clear majorities in the elected House of Commons after months of scrutiny and debate. Yet it ultimately ran out of time in the unelected House of Lords, where opponents tabled hundreds of amendments and delayed progress.
People are, of course, entitled to oppose assisted dying on religious or philosophical grounds (though I’m a Christian and support it on the basis that there’s nothing Christian about extending intolerable suffering). Many sincerely do and in good faith. But in a pluralist society, no religious tradition should have a veto over the choices available to others (please take note, Tim Farron). The Religious social conservatives, including some voices within our own party, has every right to make its case. But it absolutely does not have the right to impose its beliefs on terminally ill people who want to make the choice to end their life with dignity at a time of their choosing.
Nor should unelected peers be allowed indefinitely to frustrate legislation repeatedly endorsed by elected MPs. If the Commons once again backs this reform, Parliament must ensure that the democratic will of the elected chamber prevails.
For those facing the end of life, this debate is not theoretical. It is about dignity, bodily autonomy, and compassion. Parliament now has an opportunity to finish the job. It must take it.
Makerfield Could Change Everything
By-elections rarely alter the course of British political history. Makerfield may be the exception.
If Andy Burnham wins on Thursday, as many expect, it will likely trigger a Laboir leadership contest and potentially a Burnham premiership. Commentators across the political spectrum increasingly see the contest as a referendum not just on Keir Starmer’s leadership, but on Labour’s future direction.
So what should the Lib Dems do? Neither panic nor cheerlead.
Liberal Democrats should judge any Burnham government not by personality but by policy. Will he embrace political reform? Will he support closer ties with Europe? Will he tackle the care crisis, defend human rights and pursue meaningful devolution? Those are the questions that matter.
A Burnham premiership would likely present opportunities for cooperation on some issues and sharp disagreement on others. Liberal Democrat’s should be prepared for both.
Whatever happens on Thursday, British politics may look very different by Friday morning.
* Mathew Hulbert is a former Councillor, is a regular commentator on TV and Radio, and is Co-Host of the Political Frenemies podcast.
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31 Comments
Just to say that you’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head with your comments about the rushed ban on social media use.
However you have omitted one key argument against the proposal, and that is that it is likely to drive more young people to use the dark web or other platforms that are much more dangerous than Instagram, etc. Surely the emphasis should be on education.
We need to arm our young people with the knowledge of how to deal with social media rather than plunging them into it at an arbitrary age. If you look at social media use, the most damaging element is not that aimed at young people but that aimed at mainstream users.
Social media has normalised racism, hatred and prejudice in our society. It’s created division over virtually every single issue, drowning out attempts to find compromises and promoting ideas of society which are authoritarian and anti-democratic.
How children need protection against that and this proposal isn’t providing it, indeed it’s preventing it.
As well as all the good points made in the article and by Laurence, this is mediocre legislating which shows legislators, sadly including far too many Lib Dem MPs, are simply not up to the task of taking the time to properly understand how tech works and the legislating based on evidence and thorough knowledge of practicality, with other issues espeically AI in the near future, this is very worrying.
I have long thought that it was anomalous and indeed ridiculous that bodies like Facebook and Twitter were allowed to say “Oh, but we aren’t publishers”. The howl if the UK and/or Europe legislated to make X, Meta and so on liable as publishers would probably be audible from Mars; but the idea should be examined.
If an alternative to social media is required more effort should be ploughed into HUGELY expanding youth clubs/provisions. After all they are good meeting places where the youth leaders can educate in many ways away from endless scrolling. Money/support is always found when priorities appear, the learning of how to grow up is one of them
Neil Hickman that, and things along those lines would be the right thing to do. We taxed food companies for making unhealthy food, we didn’t ban them. We could tax (or better still precisely regulate) the unhealthy features of social media which would be in line with the current party policy (which I wrote), which is expanded on in Young Liberal Policy.
When you go down the road of introducing a ban. Don’t be surprised if this is where you end up. The tobacco ban infantalises adults as they get older – deeply illiberal. And now we have the social media ban on fifteen year olds. 12 months down the line , can vote , start a physical relationship, and finally be able to watch YouTube !
As for the assisted dying bill , I cannot understand why this government wants to reintroduce this legislation that was bitterly divisive.
Also I want to point out how ridiculous – again – the proposed 8:30PM curfew actually is. Think of what a 17 year old is allowed to do in real life by then. Yet they still can’t browse youtube after dinner? Extreme nanny state nonsense.
Not to mention the terrible impact it will have on more marganilised kids. They’ve finally found a place where they can belong and now its being ripped away from them.
I agree on the ban on social media, and I think there is one further point worth noting.
A ban will not change the behaviour of the platforms, and make them clean up their content. They will just implement some ID method, then anyone sneaking in is not their problem.
Around 2018, there was a problem with brand adverts appearing next to extremist content on Youttube, known as the Adcopalypse. Advertisers reacted with boycotts and pressure for action, and Youtube responded – with the outcome that the Youtube environment can now be controlled far better than say Facebook.
There needs to be a major element of platforms removing unacceptable types of content. Suicide tips for children, revenge porn, deep fakes, and outright political lies, are not free speech, and that needs to be in our asserted values.
Most will just comply. Perhaps not one or two – maybe Twitter because Elon Musk is an obsessive political extremist, but I’m sure we can function as a society without Twitter. But on the other hand, when Brazil took him on he did comply.
@Neil Hickman: Be careful what you wish for. Making Internet platforms liable as publishers implies that they would have to vet every single comment, video, article, picture etc before it appeared. In practice, they would probably operate similarly to traditional publishers, with only a tiny proportion of submitted media ever appearing. The current social media big players would survive, although their platforms would look very different from how they do now. They could afford the armies of lawyers it would require. But it would be the death of small-scale community forums and free-libre (open) platforms or protocols such as BlueSky.
The social media ban will change the experience for teenagers at the point that it becomes law, however, we’re missing the perspective on what happens next. For teenagers, their experience is shaped by a change in the law, for those that follow, that change is the normal. For a four year old today, they won’t grow up with the expectation of accessing unlimited social media before age 16. The backlash and overall dissent were there during decimalisation, during the smoking ban and during the implementation on stricter rules on the use of children’s booster seats. Dissent on those issues and arguments about empowerment and ‘nanny state politics’ have faded into the background. Instead we’ve got a safer society to live in (with a more coherent currency framework).
I agree with Mathew that this policy lacks the quality we deserve as it neglects the positivity that can come from social media and the connections that it brings. I see this outright ban as the first step in addressing challenges but would welcome more nuanced legislation that gets to the bottom of the addictive offering and corrosive content that is fundamentally causing harm to our societies. Addressing these challenges would benefit broader society and create a more healthy relationship with smartphones and computing. We must draw a distinction between the positive and negative social interactions we all experience.
After all, constructive debate with our community on Lib Dem Voice is probably more positive than continuous cat videos on Tik Tok.
Tom Walker the precedent more alarming than us banning young people from social media which is arguably reversible is the precedent (that is much harder to reverse) that you must show papers online to have access. Liberals are “against this sort of thing”, either liberalism has changed or a lot or a lot of our party is no longer liberal.
It’s strange that the first ten replies to Matthew’s article deal almost exclusively with the social media ban, and not the assisted dying bill which Matthew also discusses (apart from a brief mention at the end of Chloe’s comment, which I agree with).
Matthew, I agree that the social media ban for young people is very wrong. But I disagree with you completely about the assisted dying bill. I realise that you sincerely believe that terminally ill people should have the right to this choice. But surely you can see the terrible potential dangers in allowing the state to kill? Are you not at all uneasy about the fact that, for example, people with anorexia could be eligible for assisted dying? Are you not concerned about the very real fears of many disabled people? *All* the major charities representing disabled people oppose this bill. And why do you single out Tim Farron for criticism, rather than Ed Davey, Munira Wilson, Sarah Olney, and the other Lib Dem MPs who also oppose the bill? You seem to be assuming that Tim is trying to impose his religion on others, but the reasons he has given for his opposition are not specifically religious. He has spoken of his concern for the risk to vulnerable people – a very liberal concern
@chloe. In my very early days in the party, parliament legislated on abolishing hanging, allowing abortion, legalising homosexuality, allowing no fault divorce, and bringing in the Race Relations Act. All bitterly contested. Should we have abandoned this progressive legislation because it was ‘bitterly’ contested? Clearly not. Why should we abandon the Assisted Dying Bill because it is ‘bitterly’ contested? Surely debate, discussion and decision is what delta about. It’s not about a handful of unelected peers using delaying tactics to prevent legislation from going ahead.
Catherine Crosland I think this is because there is much more disappointment on the subject of the social media ban, a subject on which we have policy and where our elected representatives are being decidedly reticent about promoting it and generally being Liberal. On Assisted Dying the consensus in the party that it is up for our Parliamentarians to come to their own view on it.
@Tom Walker: Fundamental difference is that unlike tobacco, social media is not *inherently* dangerous, whether for children or adults. What makes it dangerous is the business models of the large social media platforms, particularly the algorithms. Banning social media for under-16s without addressing the business models of Big Tech — such as the selling of data for advertising, the algorithms that promote dangerous content and encourage addiction — will not make anyone safer online.
In fact, the need to collect personal data for age verification will make people *less* safe online. The online verification industry is a wild west consisting of mainly American companies with questionable business ethics (e.g. Palantir). I refuse *on principle* to submit myself to any online biometric verification for any online service. I don’t trust it, simple as that. The databases can be and have been hacked (as with the Discord data leak last year) and the data might be sold on to advertisers.
And only the largest social media platforms will be able to afford the age verification systems that any ban inevitably requires. So it will entrench the positions of the present big players. Kiss goodbye to small-scale community forums and to decentralised platforms such as BlueSky.
Try to regulate the entire Internet as if it were Facebook or X, and soon the Internet will consist only of Facebook and X.
I think insufficient attention is paid to the positive benefits that social media can bring children (as Matthew says) as well as the harms, but also that the harms affect adults too.
To draw an analogy – on a typical day in this country, 6 children are killed or injured cycling on our roads. We don’t respond to that by banning children from cycling, because the benefits in terms of exercise and mobility are valuable.
We respond by legislating to make roads safer, which in turn benefits adult cyclists as well as children. Why are we so scared of legislating to make social media safer?
” What makes it dangerous is the business models of the large social media platforms, particularly the algorithms. Banning social media for under-16s without addressing the business models of Big Tech — such as the selling of data for advertising, the algorithms that promote dangerous content and encourage addiction — will not make anyone safer online.”
Agreed.
“If an alternative to social media is required more effort should be ploughed into HUGELY expanding youth clubs/provisions. After all they are good meeting places where the youth leaders can educate in many ways away from endless scrolling. Money/support is always found when priorities appear, the learning of how to grow up is one of them”
Also agreeds.
Once upon a time online social media didn’t exist.
Don’t kids meet up in each others’ homes any more?
Surely the final decider is if the Ban saves lives or ofteenagers being in A & E with cut wrists etc after their impact with social media. Everything else is mere dross.
Are not the campaigning parents the people to listen to, and let us not get all pedantic and miss the big picture.
Mick; Debate and discussion lead to a majority of just 23. There’s very strong opinions on either side. And parliamentarians should not be giving out emotive experiences on such legislation. No matter how many safeguards we’ve heard – the vulnerable, the voiceless , the poor , the disabled – I’ve little confidence that they will be protected.
We’ve seen with the Nottingham enquiry just how such a large institution like the NHS can things so wrong. I’ve no certainty
that the vulnerable will be protected to the extent everyone wishes to see.
@theakes – so do you follow the logic that whatever it takes, if it saves just one life it will be worth it? Do you apply that same logic to everything? Even if it also has a negative impact on isolated or marginalised children who find peer support and comfort online?
Because sadly adults take their own lives too after falling victim to online fraud, romance scams and sextortion, so should we ban social media for everyone because that might save even more lives?
Overall suicide rates in England are lower now than during the 80s and 90s before social media existed, and teenagers have the lowest suicide rate of any age group. If you really want to shift the dial on death by suicide you would be worrying about middle-aged men.
Not all campaigning parents support the proposed ban, and the views of Ian Russell are valid too.
@theakes: And what about the teenage lives that might have been saved or improved because they could have gotten support through social media that they otherwise cannot get? These things are very hard to quantify. It is simplistic to assume that the effects of social media go in one direction — that social media itself is harmful with no benefits at all. (If it is, then its use should be heavily regulated for everyone.) You talk about the “big picture” but actually you are being very myopic, narrowly focusing on how you think it’s supposed to work and ignoring all the unintended consequences. The “big picture” includes the privacy implications of having to identify yourself to a shady US-based identity verification company every time you want to use an interactive online platform.
At least one campaigning parent (the father of Molly Russell) is opposed to a blanket ban and instead wants to regulate the social media companies themselves. I read that a poll has 90% of parents of young children support an outright ban. Would they support it if they understood its real-world implications (not the fantasy world of IT illiterates in which you can ban children from certain platforms, it always works perfectly and there are no bad consequences for anyone)?
The one thing that holds the Lib Dem back from being a national party is a failure to get a relevant Liberal national message framed and across to the public. I have been in the party 60 years, worked my shoe leather off, been a councillor etc etc, but we are still struggling to find the answer to being a national party. The one real occasion this happened was when we where anti Iraq war. The rest of the time we act nobly as Liberals and prod and pock here and there, finding pedantic issues and points to pontificate upon, often minority issues, that do not benefit us overall on the national stage. I fear arguing about the liberality or non liberality of the social media issue is us at it once again. I submit our improved strategy, whatever that is after the Party Conference will not benefit us in votes unless we are much bolder and get stuck in where the public as a whole are fully supportive, not a minority.
I want this party to go places and be the government.
@theakes: Our policy has to be grounded in reality, not tech-illiterate fantasy. If we do end up in government we cannot afford to be as technically clueless as the present lot. This means thinking through ALL the implications of policy (not just what you *intend* it to do) and not jumping onto bandwagons based on tabloid moral panics.
@ theakes Totally agree, moi aussi, except it’s 65 years this year in my case.
The party of ‘Middle England’ according to its current Leader – with all that that implies.
Stuck in identity politics and whatever happened to co-ownership and radical Keynesian economics ?
@Chloe. In a democracy. a majority of 1 is enough. How many elections have been won with a single or double figure majority? The plain fact is that the bill passed the Commons. The hereditary peers (now gone) have no right to use delaying tactics to prevent the bill being voted on.
If you are against the idea of assisted dying just say so. Don’t seek to obfuscate by talk of us being “bitterly divided”. As others on this thread have said many issues in the past have been said to be “bitterly divisive” but are now broadly accepted: Abolishing hanging, legalising abortion to name but two.
What I’m saying Mick – is I don’t trust the institutions in charge. After the recent horrific events , the NHS , social services , and all the other ‘professional bodies’ leave a lot to be desired when it comes to vulnerable people in society .Yes, I’m against assisted dying like so many others. And I’m well aware of what a majority looks like , even more so when 48/52 was never enough for so many in the party and beyond.
@ Chloe I’m afraid things go wrong in all sorts of human institutions, Chloe, sometimes by human error, sometimes by wickedness, in both public and private sectors. I’ve seen it when I was a Local Government Cabinet Member for Social Care.
What matters is that there are mechanisms to prevent it or to correct it. I would suggest there are more possibilities of things not going wrong in the public sector than in the private sector where profit margins are the often the most important and serious driver.
Whatever you think of the pros and cons of “assisted dying”, for the record I am against for the reasons Catherine and Chloe give, using the Parliament Act to force it through is questionable. My understanding is that the Parliament Act has only been used for this purpose fewer than 10 times. Moreover this is not a Government Bill.
Another point is that the House of Commons, not just the House of Lords, could scupper this Bill, by amending it, since in order for the Parliament Act to apply the Bill passed by the Commons must be certified as being identical to the Bill passed by the Commons in the proceeding Session. One successful amendment in the Commons and the Parliament Act no longer applies.
Of course David that’s understandable.
Sadly, too many times we’ve heard the usual PR statements rolled out.
Robust measures will be put in place.
Lessons must be learned.
Catogoric assurances will be given.
Repeat.
@ Chloe In privately owned institutions supplying personal care too often the prime driver is profit not people, that’s certainly been my experience.
“@ Chloe In privately owned institutions supplying personal care too often the prime driver is profit not people, that’s certainly been my experience.”
Whereas the USSR under Communism was an outstanding example of how the State could work in the interests of the people and for their benefit?