An internet safety campaign backed by US tech companies has been accused of censoring two teenagers they invited to speak out about the biggest issues facing children online.
Childnet, a UK charity part-funded by companies including Snap, Roblox and Meta, edited out warnings from Lewis Swire and Saamya Ghai that social media addiction was an “imminent threat to our future” and obsessive scrolling was making people “sick”, according to a record of edits seen by the Guardian.
Swire, then 17, from Edinburgh, and Ghai, then 14, from Buckinghamshire, had been asked to speak at an event to mark Safer Internet Day in 2024 in London in front of representatives from government, charities and tech companies.
The tech-backed charity also edited out references to children feeling unable to stop using TikTok and Snap, social media exacerbating a “devastating epidemic” of isolation, and a passage questioning why people would want to spend years of their lives “scrolling TikTok and binge-watching Netflix”, the edits show.
Childnet denied making edits to keep tech funders happy and insisted it would not stop young people making their points. Aspects of the approved speech did acknowledge that excessive screen time had led to depression and anxiety, and that social media companies should reduce the use of devices such as notifications, autoplay and streaks to prolong user engagement.
Heard you out… Now hear me out. Your suggestion, while it may seem logical on its face (ban all the doom-scrolling networks), is near politically impossible.
Meta, Alphabet, Tiktok etc… Banning their platforms is a utopian pipe dream presently.
Politicians act on reality - things they have the political capital (backing, party votes, public support) to achieve - and nobody has sufficient political capital to ban those giant companies. Can you imagine the years of court fights, the tarrifs threatened or imposed by the US to any country that wants to ban the big social media giants?
What they do have is a majority of experts in psychology, psychiatry, public policy and technology telling them “well a close second would be to minimise the damage to kids by banning under 16s”, so they do that instead.
By the principle of least harm, banning under 16s is a much more useful action than banning the platforms - as it’s actually practicable in short term timeframe.