It was a Friday afternoon. We were by the school bus stop and I was about to ask her out. My friends knew I was going to – her friends knew it too – and I waited until the last possible moment and had to run after her down the road. I thought it was romantic: it felt like something I’d seen in a Richard Curtis film. “Can I tell you on MSN?” she asked. It wasn’t until we were both online that evening that I understood she was trying to let me down gently.
MSN was like WhatsApp before smartphones. You could talk to your friends, for free, all night. At one point, it meant I could have a “girlfriend” I had never met in person because she lived 200 miles away, in Ashford.
Six years earlier, I saw pornography for the first time, after the sixth formers, as part of their last-day shenanigans, had printed out pictures of two women having sex and stuck them to bus windows. I remember being mocked for staring, which, to be fair, was what I was doing. I later searched for the source material, and burst into tears when my dad reviewed the browsing history.
It all sounds impossibly analogue today, but they are fragments of a normal teenage life amid the introduction of social media. A computer with a dial-up modem existed in my childhood, and I was a young adult when Snapchat launched in 2011. Crucially, none of my cohort’s early websites of choice, such as MySpace or Bebo, had infinite scroll. We accessed them from desktop computers. They pretty much showed only content from friends and family, to the extent that they were algorithmically driven at all.
Social media is often spoken of as though it is one technology. It isn’t. The apps that children use today are structurally different from the websites of my adolescence. Somewhere along the way, the internet stopped being somewhere you went and became somewhere you lived. David Bowie wasn’t wrong when he told Jeremy Paxman in 1999 that the internet was not technology. He called it an “alien life form”. Now, a consensus is building across the political class that this invasive entity needs to be sent back into space.
One of the paradoxes of my career is that I believe these platforms to be a net negative for our society and yet I’ve spent my entire professional life creating content for those very platforms. That does not mean I think they should be banned for those under 16. It doesn’t mean I think that every adult in Britain – where thousands of people have been arrested over their social media posts – should be forced to tie their real identity to their online persona. I don’t believe prohibition will fix this problem, if there even is one. I worry about clamping down on a teenager’s right to freely express themselves, because I know that the problem isn’t teenagers. The problem is that we’ve collectively accepted products that are designed to capitalise on our dwindling attention spans.
Enter Jonathan Haidt, the renowned public intellectual, whose work on this subject has captured, across the globe, the imaginations of middle-class parents, with whom a ban is extremely popular. Stanley Cohen argued in 1972 that hysteria emerges when societies compress complex social problems into a single, recognisable villain and demand that “something must be done”. Today’s smartphone-addled teenager risks becoming that kind of folk devil. The concern is real. The evidence of harm is real. But that doesn’t mean the solution being pursued by our government – a blanket ban – is the right one.
We increasingly expect the state to fix catastrophes created by corporations. A recent study published in the British Medical Journal found 85 per cent of teenagers in Australia – a place where a social media ban came into force in December 2025 – had accessed it in the past seven days.
Adolescence is about experimentation, breaking norms, taking risks and forming identity. It is a period of self-discovery. Social media was not involved when I hosed a bottle of Famous Grouse and was sick all over myself in Year 8. It had nothing to do with me breaking in to my dad’s place and throwing a house party while he was on holiday in Year 10. And it wouldn’t have stopped me fighting with some other kids who lived down the road in Year 9 (maybe someone would’ve videoed me curling into the foetal position as the kicks came in, granted). Teenagers put themselves in danger regardless of their access to social media. Keir Starmer called his ban “real change for our children and our future”. But one thing you can be certain of is that what makes a teenager doesn’t change.
Despite my litany of criminality/trauma (delete according to your wing of the Labour Party), I’ve turned out to be a relatively well-adjusted member of society. Readers may disagree. I have a wife and two children, a house, a car, a job, whatever else is in that Ewan McGregor monologue from Trainspotting. I FaceTime my family in Australia, though not often. Sometimes permanent connection is progress. Usually it isn’t. The internet I grew up with wasn’t better because it was slower; it was better because it left enough space for life to happen offline. We won’t fix products designed to exploit teenagers – or us – by pretending the users are the problem.
Listen to Jonathan Haidt in conversation with Oli Dugmore on our interview podcast The Exchange
[Further reading: We need better social media – not no social media]
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This article appears in the 01 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Happy Birthday America
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentI’m sorry this is plainly contradictory.
Just because you were stupid enough to neck an entire bottle of Famous Grouse in Year 8 (weren’t we all) doesn’t mean its a bad idea that children aren’t allowed to buy whisky.
Yes, the problem is teenagers are stupid, so don’t give them free, easy, and sanctioned access to the tools that will turn that stupidity into a real crisis.
Teenagers will find ways to behave self destructively whatever we do, but our job as parents is to put barriers in the way of that, not pull them up.
I agree.
The piece is full of logical disconnects. It falls into the “I used to be a screw-up but look at me now” school of writing.
Life can & should be about getting to a good place without serious screw-ups.