President Emmanuel Macron is fast tracking a French ban on the use of social media, and of mobile phones, by children under the age of 15, so that the legislation may be in place before the start of the school year in September. He has said, “The brains of our children and our teenagers are not for sale. The emotions of our children and our teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, neither by American platforms, nor by Chinese algorithms.” I thought President Macron looked very cool in his ray-bans. (Other shades are available.) I don’t know, but I assume he had suffered a subconjunctival haemorrhage, which sounds, and looks, frightful, but is entirely benign. Naturally, the Donald mocked him.
The expression “not for sale” has a certain potent currency. Mark Carney has said of Canada, and Mette Frederiksen of Greenland, that they are not for sale. In the social media context, the implication is that powerful forces target a vulnerable market with a commodity that is addictive. The cigarette companies did the same, and still do. Vapes are colourful and flavoursome, targeted at children the way supermarket confectionary is sited, or sighted, at toddlers’ eye level beside the checkout counter. The social media companies utilise algorithms that are designed to keep the user hooked, by providing what has been erroneously described as a “dopamine hit”. Don’t shoot the messenger. All over the world, children are spending hours staring at their smart phones. You hand children a book and they attempt to interact with it by tapping the page, or scrolling down. On social media, most of the content they devour is aptly puerile, but at the sinister end of the spectrum, unbelievably, children can be encouraged to do away with themselves.
Here en Grande-Bretagne, the government is closely watching events in Australia, where the social media ban for under-sixteens is already in place. In Australia, the platforms Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch are banned. The British Government is minded to follow suit, but the Lords are introducing their own amendments and the whole thing could easily be stymied by parliamentary procedure. The last word you could use to describe the Mother of Parliaments would be “nimble”. And interestingly, many of the parents whose children have taken their own lives as a result of exposure to harmful content on social media are not convinced of the wisdom of an outright ban.
But it seems to me that an important question has not been asked by, and of, the body politic. If social media are harmful to children, why are they not also harmful to adults? If children need to come off social media, should not adults do the same? Should not, in fact, adults be an example, lead the way, and show their children how to log off? We elders, after all, are as prone to addiction, and to manipulation, as anybody else. If I were going to impose a social media ban on any segment of society, I would target politicians. Is there any sight more depressing than that of a Member, seated on the green benches, staring at a mobile, impervious to the debate that is going on?
But of course, politicians would not dream of coming off social media. They are terrified, much like children, of being out of the loop. So they don’t communicate directly with one another, or with us, by word of mouth, or in print. They post on X. Or the Donald posts on his own Truth Social, an oxymoron if ever there was one. His Board of Peace is Orwellian. Didn’t the Ministry of Truth say “War is Peace”?
The fact is, the whole of society is in the vicelike grip of an addiction. You only need to turn on the radio to be swamped with society’s overwhelming obsession with the virtual world. The reference to “your feed” never stops. We seem to be bombarded by a welter or information, or misinformation, or disinformation, from a multitude of sources. And yet direct communication between human beings is becoming increasingly rare. We have all been faced with the problem of trying to communicate with a multinational conglomerate, or trying to negotiate on the phone with an endless algorithm, or to talk to a robot who does not understand our accent. I see that when the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party decided to ban Andy Burnham from standing in the by-election in the Greater Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton, they never told him. They said they tried to contact him but couldn’t. Incidentally, I have an idea that the decision made by the committee will come back to haunt them. I predict David Yelland and Simon Lewis will talk it over on When it Hits the Fan, and I reckon will pronounce it a PR disaster.
Of course we’re all addicted to something. I’m addicted to books. What is the difference between an interest, or an enthusiasm, and an obsession, or an addiction? Interests and enthusiasms good, obsessions and addictions bad, I suppose. But why bad? Bad, presumably, because bad for our health, physically, mentally, and spiritually. I don’t suppose my book addiction is doing me much harm, other than by cluttering up my house, but all the same you know you have a problem when you buy a book you already have. Last week in Waterstones I picked up Goldeneye by Matthew Parker (Hutchinson 2014), read it, thought it was terribly good, and put it on my shelf only to discover I already had it, and had already read it. I did exactly the same with Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, and it won the Booker Prize. Bit of a worry.
Other people’s addictions are incomprehensible to those of us who don’t share them, like gambling, or indeed like social media. New Zealand Gewürztraminer yes, but then again may I smugly crow I’m having a dry January. Twenty five days down, six to go. I’m tempting fate; races are often lost at the last hurdle, but I celebrated Burns Night last night with a cuppa tea, so bar the totally unforeseeable I should make it. I might even stay on the wagon, who knows? Not drinking is as much of a habit as drinking. Poor old Ian Fleming, in his Goldeneye hideaway on the north shore of Jamaica seemed to be hooked on gin and nicotine. Gin makes me sad. I call it the Juniper Blues. No wonder the melancholy Old Etonian was, well, so melancholy. And, like Bond, he smoked sixty sticks of cigarette a day. His alter ego killed him.
Sugar is another addiction targeted at the vulnerable. We are back at the supermarket checkout, with the sweeties two feet off the ground. And this also takes us back to France. There was recently an “aux barricades” moment in a French supermarket when customers, frustrated at the lack of staff at the checkout counters, took matters into their own hands, loaded up trolleys with goods and gridlocked the aisles until the checkouts were appropriately staffed. It could only happen in France. There was communication about this in The Herald, which prompted me to write this short missive, published today:
On the subject of supermarket checkouts (Herald Letters, January 24), the French have a nickname for the checkout lady… la beepeuse.
And the Germans have a word for the item, often shaped like a well-known Swiss chocolate bar, that separates customers’ shopping on the checkout conveyor belt… die Kassentoblerone. Here en Grande-Bretagne, if we’re stuck with automatic checkouts, I have an idea to make the process more amusing. Why not make the scanner a Dalek?
I would love to hear it say, in characteristically harsh tones: “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGAGE AREA!” The kids would love it.
jamescalumcampbell 