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Keir Starmer has pledged action on young people’s access to social media in “months, not years”, while saying this did not necessarily mean a complete ban on access for under-16s.
Speaking at an event in London after the government promised to extend the crackdown to AI chatbots that place children at risk, Starmer said the issue was nuanced and that a ban was not definite, noting concerns from charities such as the NSPCC.
“I think this is such an important issue that we need to go into it with a ban as a possibility,” he told a community hub in Putney, saying he would “definitely want to look at the evidence” gathered during a three-month consultation.
He added: “There are powerful arguments on both sides. Some people simply say just get all under-16s off social media, and that’s the end of it. NSPCC, obviously an organisation very concerned with children’s protection, says no, it’ll push children to even darker places.
“Others – I was with young people this morning, 15- and 16-year-olds who are actually going to be affected by this – they said to me, look we get our news from social media, we don’t read the papers, and therefore you’ll stop us accessing the news. We need to look at all of this in the round.”
Downing Street has announced plans to rush through any changes recommended after the consultation by tabling amendments to two bills already going through parliament, the children’s wellbeing and schools bill, and the crime and policing bill.
The plan would be for these amendments to create powers for ministers to implement various plans, with the children’s bill covering social media and the crime bill closing possible loopholes connected to AI chatbots. This would, Starmer said, allow rapid action.
“We’ve taken the powers to make sure we can act within months, not years,” he said. “We also need to act very quickly, not just on the age concern, but on the devices and applications that make the sort of auto-scrolling, the constant glueing to the machine that you can never stop scrolling.”
He added: “I don’t think there’s a parent in the country who isn’t worried about this, by the way, I really don’t. The status quo, things as they are now, is not good enough. Nobody can make the argument that things can be left as they are. They can’t, they’re not protective of children, and we intend to act.”
Asked if MPs and peers would get a chance to debate and vote on the specifics of any policy which emerged, as well as just the amendments to empower them happening, Downing Street indicated this would be the case. “Both houses will have to approve the secondary legislation which will deliver the policies,” Starmer’s official spokesperson said, pointing reporters to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) for details. DSIT was contacted for comment.
In an earlier post on his Substack page, Starmer expanded on his worries about social media, setting out that he believed that in its current form it harmed children. “When Facebook first launched in 2004, it was a pretty simple concept,” he wrote. “Make a profile, post updates that people could look at in the order they were posted, like and comment on what your friends had to say.
“That is a world away from the algorithms, endless scrolling, For You pages and private chats that make up the modern world of social media. In the past 20-plus years, social media has evolved to become something completely different from the simple, stripped-back pages it was in its conception.
“And in that evolution, it has become something that is quietly harming our children. A harm that, due to the inaction of previous Tory governments, we are allowing to happen.”
