One group of teens will have access to social media totally disabled, while a second group will be limited to one hour per day on specific apps including Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. A third group will be blocked from social media between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., and a fourth will have regular access to act as the control group.<\/p>\n
Representatives from Meta, Google, TikTok, and X appeared before the Science, Innovation, and Technology select committee this week, and were pressed by MPs on whether they were for or against the idea of a social media ban.<\/p>\n
TikTok\u2019s Director of Public Policy for Northern Europe Alistair Law said it was \u201cfor policymakers to decide,\u201d whether a ban for children was appropriate. He then summarized TikTok\u2019s stance on a ban as \u201cneutral\u201d after being pushed by MPs.<\/p>\n
X\u2019s Director of Global Government Affairs Wifredo Fernandez also described his company\u2019s stance as \u201csort of neutral at the moment,\u201d adding: \u201cWe have no business in kids \u2026 globally less than 1 percent of our user base are under the age of 18 and over 13, in the U.K. that\u2019s less than half of a percent, so we don\u2019t have a major dog in this fight,\u201d<\/p>\n
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, came out slightly more strongly against a ban. Rebecca Stimson, U.K. Director of Public Policy at Meta, said she didn\u2019t think a ban would \u201csolve the problems that the government is trying to solve.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stimson also said that children are \u201cnot a revenue-generator\u201d for Meta because of advertising restrictions. Labour MP Samantha Niblett seemed unconvinced by that argument, responding: \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for you, sucking kids in then? Is it basically, it\u2019s making it ubiquitous in their lives so that when they\u2019re older they\u2019re sort of addicted to your platforms so you can make money?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One group of teens will have access to social media totally disabled, while a second group will be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3845,59,57,58,2453,420,3714,50,998,224,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-494641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-big-tech","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-innovation","tag-keir-starmer","tag-media","tag-news","tag-platforms","tag-social-media","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}