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Labour MP, John MacAlister is bringing forward a private members bill to protect young people from data sharing on social media and smartphones.
This is in the wake of Australia pressing ahead for a social media ban for under 16’s.
The bill would aim to protect vulnerable children from doom scrolling and addictive content by disabling the data sharing feature on their smartphones.
He told the Today programme on Radio 4 on Friday:
“The fact that (the Australian government) is proposing it speaks to something that’s happening all around the world, which is governments waking up to concerns that parents, teachers, and actually children themselves have of the effect of excess screen time, doom-scrolling, and the fact that it’s displacing a huge amount of time that kids used to spend in real life interacting with people.”
As well as the Bill itself, Mr MacAlister has recommended raising the age of internet adulthood and data sharing from 13 to 16 to protect the most vulnerable in society adding
“That would have the effect of making it much harder for tech companies to use children’s data to feed algorithms that then feed stuff back to children that is very addictive.”He added: “I’m not proposing to ban social media for under-16s, but I am putting forward a number of measures that would make it much less addictive for children using smartphone and social media under the age of 16, and shift their time away from the 21 hours on average that a 12-year-old is spending a week on a smartphone, so it improves their mental health, their sleep, and their learning.”