“So many things are happening at once,” says Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and a specialist in children and social media.
Social media has transformed our relationships with our friends and family, brought unfiltered news from around the world to our handsets and introduced us to an unending supply of cat memes.
But as the first generation of social media natives start to have children of their own, there is increasing unease about tech’s impact on children.
And we have big tech outrunning regulation in all directions.” It is a perfect storm, she says, into which discussion of an outright ban on social media for under-16s has come as a supposed saviour.
These concerns prompted Australia to pass legislation last November banning access to social media for under-16s.
