House of Lords pushes for Australian-style social media ban for under-16s

The House of Lords has backed an Australian-style social media ban for under-16s.Peers, in a vote of 266 to 141, rejected Keir Starmer’s proposals for a public consultation to decide whether a ban should be introduced.The Conservative former minister Lord Nash said the vote sent an “unambiguous message” to Starmer’s government.“Tonight the House of Lords sent for the second time an unambiguous message to the government: hollow promises and half-measures are not enough,” Nash said in a statement.It is the second time Nash has pushed for a ban on under-16s from social media, after MPs voted against it earlier this month.He said: “That they voted in even greater numbers than before sends a very clear message to the government that they must act now to raise the age limit for access to harmful social media sites to 16.”Nash said that peers were “all conscious, as we voted, that watching from the gallery were bereaved parents – parents who lost their children because of social media”.“Delay has consequences,” he said.The vote comes after a jury in Los Angeles found that Meta, the owner of Facebook, and YouTube designed deliberately addictive products that harmed a 20-year-old’s mental health.The California jury ruled that Meta and Google-owned YouTube must pay $6m (£4.5m) in damages to the woman who says she became addicted to social media as a child, exacerbating her mental health struggles. TikTok and Snap settled before the trial began.The decision could influence the outcome of thousands of similar lawsuits in the US accusing social media companies of deliberately causing harm.Nash, who proposed the age limit as part of the children’s wellbeing and schools bill, said “techies” had taken a “cavalier approach” to content that was damaging to children.Nash said the Los Angeles court judgment showed the platforms had been designed to be addictive and MPs had a chance to act.“We will not accept half-measures or further delay. We need leadership so that we can give our children their childhood back,” he said.More than 20 family members sat in the gallery, including George and Areti Nicolaou, who clutched a photo of their son Christoforos, who took his own life after joining an online forum.The paediatrician and crossbench peer Lady Cass said the government was “failing to understand the impact of social media on our children”.She said: “The government is taking a very, very narrow view to social media.“They are locked into the psychological aspects of it, which are hugely important, but they are failing to look at the wider aspects and the direct harms that are being reiterated time and time again by professionals, both in schools, in clinics, and by the families who are sitting up in the gallery now.“And it is disrespectful of the trauma to those families and to the people who are suffering direct harm to continue to grab headlines with these sort of cheap efforts to say we’re piloting something which is going to give us no information at all.”Additional reporting PA Media