No, parents must be responsible

and be held responsible. You are not going to get children under sixteen off social media by trying to make "big tech" responsible. It will not work...or rather, it might work but not in the way the government intends.

I am fed up with the "ban". It is not working. You only have to walk through the shopping centre after school is out or watch the gang waiting to catch the train. You only need to be anywhere under sixteens are gathered and more than one of them will have a phone out and they will be looking at video clips and more. Of course they will. They have the technology in their hands.

The answer to banning under sixteens from social media is complex of course, even answering the question of whether they should be banned is not a simple "yes" or "no". The problem is that the government brought in legislation which has a secondary purpose. This is not about getting under sixteens off social media. It is about controlling social media. 

If they had simply wanted to prevent under sixteens from using social media then most use could have been wiped out instantly by making it illegal for an under sixteen to have a phone. That would have been the most radical solution. Parents would not have accepted that. They would have cited all sorts of "safety" reasons. 

There is an obvious answer then isn't there? Under sixteens can only have phones with a limited number of functions. They "need" phones that can make and receive calls, make and receive text messages. What else do they need for "safety"? Nothing. Such phones exist. They are not expensive. They are far cheaper than the phones which can access social media. They work on much cheaper plans. 

There could be a government scheme for all of this. You want your child to have a phone? We will allow your child to have one from this range. It will not be able to do more than we allow. Here kids, you can choose from bright yellow, lime green, hot pink, punk purple. We will be able to see if you are using something else. If we catch you using anything else then your parents will be held to account. 

It is not the role of "big tech" to deal with this. So, why is the government doing it? The answer to that is almost certainly a desire to try and control the use of social media or, at very least, the desire to be able to monitor everything which is said and done there. When the ban on social media doesn't work they are hoping for two things. The first is that the "big tech" owners will bring in measures that drastically reduce our ability to access information. A great deal of the information out there is inaccurate but so is the information passed on to us from "official" sources. The latter however is what the government of the day wants us to know, even if it is not true.  The second is that, when the information flow has been reduced and directed in ways the government finds more acceptable they will be able to still further control the growth of AI and the forms of information which are available. 

Social media may be a "scourge" but trying to control it now is something which might be working in North Korea and might work for short periods of time in places like Iran. Is that what we want?