It’s not the state’s job to manage kids’ screentime

Forget the big issues like housing and the economy, Ed Davey and his marching band have declared a war on doomscrolling. The Liberal Democrats’ latest bright idea is to set a legal cap of two hours a day on kids’ use of social media, complete with a cigarette-style health warning slapped across smartphone apps. Labour, its leadership never able to resist a good gimmick, is reportedly sniffing around the idea too.

Glancing at the headlines, it’s tempting to see this latest intervention as common sense. Everyone agrees kids need to spend less time on screens. Parents complain, teachers despair and who doesn’t roll their eyes at the sight of an ‘iPad baby’?

But the idea that Whitehall can, or should, slap a daily screen-time ration on kids is absurd. It is yet another cringeworthy example of politicians mistaking themselves for substitute parents.

The entire premise of the ‘doomscrolling cap’ rests on a false analogy. We’re told that social media should be treated like cigarettes and alcohol (after all, who would want their child puffing on a Marlborough?). It’s harmful, addictive, and supposedly in urgent need of regulation. The issue with that comparison is that social-media content is not ‘poison’. Reading things you don’t like is hardly comparable to knocking back one too many vodka shots. At worst, endless scrolling wreaks havoc on your or your child’s attention span and wastes time. Like smoking (the ban on which is equally as daft), the solution isn’t prohibition, but moderation; the sort that responsible adults are quite capable of exercising over themselves and their children without government assistance. The suggestion that a cap should be introduced to ‘prevent harm’ is ludicrous. What next? A national bedtime to ensure kids get their full eight hours?

Here’s the real kicker: in order to enforce this ‘two-hour doomscrolling cap’, Whitehall would need surveillance powers most authoritarians could only dream of. It would require tech firms to track and report users constantly, as well as a further roll-out of existing (highly controversial) age-verification tools, and systems to lock children out automatically when the cap is hit. In other words, it would involve mass data collection on a nationwide scale, courtesy of a Whitehall-Silicon Valley partnership.

Needless to say, this collusion between Whitehall and Big Tech would not stop at rationing screentime. At risk of sounding like I spent the morning fashioning myself some tin-foil headgear, why, if you had the infrastructure to track and restrict online behaviour, would you stop at time limits? Why not filter content, ban ‘harmful’ topics, block ‘dangerous’ opinions? Politicians of all stripes are already salivating at the prospect of ‘misinformation’ crackdowns. The tech needed for doomscrolling caps would only hand them more tools to extend censorship.

There is enough compelling evidence that voluntary solutions work far better than bans. Many schools already require pupils to hand their phones in at the start of the day, with impressive results. Parents across the country already have their own rules in place for smartphones – as they should when it comes to managing their own kids in their own homes.

The Liberal Democrats – nominal defenders of liberal ideals – will continue to present this policy as enlightened, modern and even compassionate. In reality, it is a thinly veiled excuse for the government to intervene in family life. This isn’t really about doomscrolling at all, but the presumption that parents are too weak or lazy to raise their own children.

If you want a generation that can thrive online and off, we must reject this digital nannying. Teens will learn to live with TikTok in their own way, just as generations before learned to live alongside radio and TV. For now, it is incumbent on our politicians to leave the parenting to the parents, and get over their blatant distrust of ordinary people.

Aaron Newbury is a former Conservative Party adviser.