Bans on social media and phones - what is the evidence?
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The most wonderful time of the year. Although, let's be honest, around the holidays, things really add up. But here's the good news. Only at Verizon, you can get a single line for $50 per month when you switch and bring your phone. So while ice skating for two is definitely costing more, here at Verizon, you can save. Gifts for your third cousins? Steep.

A single line with Verizon, not so steep. A real tree, pricey. A single line with Verizon, less pricey. Flights to see Meemaw and Pops, those are up. A $50 per month single line, that's down. Even a trip to the San Francisco holiday market will cost you more. But with Verizon, you can switch and bring your phone for just $50 per month for a single line on unlimited welcome with auto pay plus taxes and fees.

All this to say, during the holiday season, when everything is costing more, you can get more for less right now at a local Verizon store. $15 monthly promo credit supplied over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G, 4G, LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional terms apply.

Hello, it's Hannah Gelbart here. Welcome to this episode of What's in the World from the BBC World Service. Today we're talking about your phone. You may have just checked yours. I don't know. It's a bit of a reflex. I keep on grabbing mine to check for notifications and messages. It feels like if I were to leave my phone at home for even just a few hours, there's this sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. I'm totally hooked on it.

And as long as there have been smartphones, we've been talking about whether children should have them. Should they be allowed in schools? What kind of age limits should there be on social media? But what evidence is there that smartphones are actually bad for us? And what do students make of it?

Well, here to talk us through it is BBC journalist Hayley Clarke. Hey. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Great to have you in the studio. So I thought if we're going to be talking about teenagers and their phones and we're going to be talking about schools and whether they should be banned, we have to be really honest as well because I don't know about you, but like,

Every week my phone tries to tell me my screen time and I quickly flick it away in like fear and shame. So I want you to go to your settings. Okay, okay, getting them up. And if you go to your screen time, there should be a little purple egg timer. My heart's actually beating really fast. I'm quite scared. Right, are you ready? We're going to have a look and then show each other. Okay, three, two, one.

Shall we? Let's see. Okay. It's four hours and 14 minutes every day. Four hours and 14 minutes. Yeah, four hours and 14 minutes of time spent or wasted on this. There's been a malfunction because mine says three hours 29, but that is definitely lower. It's usually like...

Tipping towards five, I would say. Five hours. I have ADHD and I just cannot resist. So the notifications, the distractions, I'll go on it for like actually useful purposes, maybe internet banking, maybe to read something on the news, maybe to reply to a message I actually need to see. And I just cannot resist then the other notifications and the dopamine hit that comes from

I can't have like an unread notification. I can't have an unread email. Like that gives me anxiety. I have to make sure that all of my notifications are checked. I understand. Well,

Oh, not healthy. I think I'm using my phone way too much. How does it compare to the average? So it's hard to get sort of a consistent account around the world. But some statistics say that adults like over 18s are using their phones for almost five hours a day. So kind of towards my age.

Higher one, exactly like us. Makes me feel slightly less guilty. And actually, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated screen time overall for 11 to 14-year-olds as nine hours a day and seven and a half hours. Nine hours? Yes.

Okay. Actually, that makes me feel a bit better about my... But we didn't add in our computer and TV time and all of that. So that's screen time overall, I think. So it does seem like the data is showing that phone use and screen time is just consistently rising. So it kind of makes sense, right, that some countries are now talking about bans or restrictions or limits on phones and social media use. Which are the main countries that are talking about it?

So in 2023, a UN report recommended that smartphones should be bad in schools. They said to reduce classroom disruption and protect kids from being in school.

kids from online bullying. And there's lots of different countries trialling lots of different things. So in France, there is a trial happening called a digital pause, where over 200 schools are asking teenagers to hand in their phones at reception. Here in the UK, the government's looking at legislation to potentially ban under-16s from social media.

And in the US, it kind of varies state by state. But in Florida, a bill has passed to ban social media for under 14s. And that's going to come into force in January 2025. And Australia wants to go further than this. Australia's government says it will introduce world-leading legislation to ban children under 16 from social media. And I saw that the Australian prime minister said that

like parents, we're listening to you. So a lot of the rhetoric and debate kind of seems to be

people in power and parents. I'm not sure how much the teenagers and young people are being involved in these discussions. Hannah Ritchie is a BBC journalist based in Australia and she's going to tell us a bit more about what's going on there. There's a lot that we still don't know and how this will be enforced or implemented needs to be decided by Australia's internet regular, which will happen over the next 12 months before these laws come into effect.

But so far, here's what the government has said. Tech companies will face fines for not complying and messaging services and gaming sites will be exempt, which has prompted questions over the status of apps like Snapchat and how regulators will ultimately define what is and isn't a social media platform.

The government has said it's trialling age verification technology to make all of this possible, but there's very few details about how that technology will work and if it will work, as well as privacy concerns over the risks involved, as it might entail collecting a whole generation of users' ID documents

Overall, parents and families have applauded the proposed ban, but the tech companies themselves have warned it could push children into more unregulated parts of the internet, while experts have criticised it as too blunt an instrument. They say that the evidence base isn't solid and also that the focus should be on tougher regulation to make platforms safer, as well as educating kids about how these platforms work, rather than just cutting them off altogether.

While I'm listening to Hannah talking, I'm like holding on to my two devices. I've got my phone and my iPod. I'm like, don't take them away from me. It was really interesting. She said there isn't a solid evidence base. So what evidence do we actually have that smartphones, you know, affect our brains, our mental health? I think that's really still emerging. So some scientists say we definitely have data. We know phones are bad for young people's mental health. And we know that smartphones are bad for young people's mental health.

But then on the other side, some scientists argue there's not robust data. We don't know yet. And actually more needs to be done over longer periods of time to say whether this is definitely an issue. So there's one guy who's American and he's written a book which has had loads of publicity. He's a social psychologist called Jonathan Haidt. And this is him talking about his thing.

It's the complete transformation of childhood that took place between 2010 and 2015. So that before then, hardly any kids had a smartphone. They didn't have high-speed data plans. They had to pay for their texts. So you couldn't really be online for six hours a day before 2010. You had a flip phone. By 2015, everything's changed.

The great majority have a smartphone with a high speed data plan. They have an Instagram account and now they can be on 10 hours a day. And they're on more than 10 hours a day in that even when they're not, they're thinking about it. And that's why we see for boys and for girls, an elbow, a bend in the mental health stats. They all begin going north. They all begin going up, up, up the rates of mental illness around 2013. There's some really stunning data just out now. Now that we're past COVID, kids have been in school for a couple of years.

And what you see is a little increase from COVID, but this is on like a mountain range going up from baseline to the top of Mount Everest. And along the way, just near the top, you do see a little spike that's COVID.

But Mount Everest is from the phone-based childhood. It's not from COVID. COVID didn't leave a lasting mark in anything like the way the transformation of childhood did. And those graphs, those numbers were going down a little bit in the 2010s for the millennials, born 1981 to 1995. They have actually pretty good mental health and it was getting slightly better. And then when the first member of Gen Z, born 1996, when that first

kid got a smartphone and an Instagram account and moved her life onto that, that cut off real relationships with other kids. Why did it happen exactly the same way in all of the Anglosphere? And it wasn't global warming. Greta Thunberg doesn't make it a global issue until 2018.

And any sort of economic issue like a global financial crisis, that's the other thing that could be global. But the timing is all wrong. That was 2008. By 2013, the economy has been getting better and better for years, certainly in the United States. There's lots of academics who disagree that phones should be banned and social media should be banned for under-16s. And one of those is Professor Pete Etchells. There haven't yet really been any good studies, you know, things like randomised controlled trials, etc.

that look at what the potential positive or negative effects of bans might look like, especially in the long term. Anecdotally, though, we know that in situations where children and young people have had their access to digital tech restricted, those sorts of regulations tend to backfire. So in South Korea, for instance, a law was passed in 2011 to prevent young people from accessing the internet between about midnight and 6am. And this was so that they could get more sleep.

But actually, it only led to an extra minute and a half of sleep per night, and it increased the amount of time that they spent on the internet. It just happened earlier in the day. There's nothing magical about the age of 16 that means that if you get a phone at that age, you'll suddenly just know how to use it appropriately. What we need to be doing is thinking about how do we support people of all ages, especially children and young people, in developing healthier habits and healthier relationships with digital tech.

so that whenever they do get their own smartphone, they're properly equipped to use it in a safe way. If we can have more sensible, rational conversations about what we like and what we really don't like about the technologies that are a part of our day-to-day lives, then actually we can better hold tech companies to account. And what we ultimately want to do then is make sure that they put our well-being and our safety at the core of their design and not treat it as an afterthought.

So a big study in Norway was really kind of making waves across the world this year. It was a longer term study than others that have existed. And what it found, what its results showed was that smartphone bans in schools meant less bullying, better mental health and better outcomes for teenagers, particularly girls from low socioeconomic backgrounds. But what the professor I spoke to said is that

There was variation in the study. So some schools were a lot more strict and others were more lenient. And he said that there isn't enough evidence to show that a strict ban is really necessary and in many cases maybe a more lenient ban. So say, for example, where students could keep their phones on them but just not use them in class.

He said that actually that can be just as effective as the stricter side where maybe you hand in your phone to reception in the morning at school. You can see in the data that mental health for teenagers appears to be getting worse. But some scientists and academics are arguing that maybe that's because the conversations around mental health are happening more often. And actually, we have the language about anxiety and depression that maybe we didn't have previously.

back in 2013. So it's really difficult to know whether it is a correlation or whether the phones are actually causing these mental health issues. Let's hear from some of the people who would be affected by these bans.

Hi, I'm Sonia. I'm 16 years old, and if I couldn't use my phone at school at all, I feel like, honestly, I'd be pretty okay with that since I like socializing with a lot of my friends during the day anyway. But I would feel a little unsafe if I couldn't contact anyone if I got into trouble. And if I couldn't access any social media until I was 16 or 17, I feel like

I would not be as knowledgeable as I am about real world experiences and a lot of struggles that a lot of people go through because I get a lot of stories about people's personal experiences through social media. And it really just gives me like an insight into people's

daily lives through like in different places in the world. And here are some school students who sent us voice notes from France. So my name is Acer. I'm 16. I'm in high school. In my opinion, the digital pose experiment that's happening in France is a great idea. But I'm still for the fact that

students in high school can have their mobile phone because with the help of their mobile phones they can be more independent, they can manage their own schedule, their appointments,

They are old enough, I think, in my opinion, to manage all of this. And for the students in major schools, they are too young and need to stay away from all these distractions of the phone because the phone can have a true impact on their life. Hi, my name is Aline and I'm 17.

In our high school, we use most of the time our smartphone except when we are in the class. So for me, this experiment might be a very good idea in the high school because it's very important to draw away from the screen otherwise you become addict

and you start to do nothing. See you soon. Bye. Hello, my name is Rufy Akubi, and I'm a 16-year or second-year high school student. There are so many times where I have just seen people lock themselves in the bathrooms to use the phone or like film TikToks, and I just found that very annoying.

And I feel like the newer generation, myself included, can really have trouble focusing for a long period of time just because of all the content we watch or just getting easily distracted by the phone.

So Hayley, how have the phone and the social media companies responded to calls for bans? So not many of the companies have commented, but Meta, who own Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has raised concerns about how age verification would work and the amount of personal data that might need to be shared. And Meta's also argued that app stores run by Google and Apple should be the ones to enforce these age restrictions effectively.

an age verification rather than the apps themselves. Some apps are starting to introduce protections for younger users. So Instagram has teen accounts and Meta says this will limit the contents teens can see. So tech companies are trying to do things to reduce the amount of time that people are spending on phones and also like the harmful material they can access. But

What can I do to try and get some of my life back? Four hours a day or more I'm spending on this thing. Like, what can I do to try and fix that dependence? Well, you could do, like, the extreme option, which some teenagers are doing around the world, which is just to abandon your smartphone altogether and get a brick phone. You're not going to be distracted by...

I don't think I could because I need the maps. I need the taxi apps. Right. Then what you could try, you could try do not disturb mode or you could try turning off your notifications or my ADHD coach did recommend. So back in the start of the year, I was really thinking about this a lot and like New Year's resolutions were coming around and I was like, I'm going to do it. This is the year I'm going to like.

crack it with my phone and just like not use it as much um obviously totally failed as we've seen on my screen time but um my ADHD coach was recommending I make a little box and he was like decorate it really nicely and you can have this thing called phone in a box time where you put the phone in and it's not a punishment because it's all decorated it's all really nice and pretty

Obviously, I never even made the box. Like putting the phone to phone bed. Yeah, putting the phone to phone bed. Maybe next year. Maybe next year. Hayley, I'm going to try out some of your things, try and build a phone box. Thank you for coming on to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you so much for joining us for this episode of What's in the World from the BBC World Service. You can get in touch with us any time. You probably have to use your phone for it, so I don't know if that's very helpful. But we are on WhatsApp, we're on Instagram, and we'll be back with another episode soon.

See you then. Bye. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. Three years after the Taliban swept to power, as many as eight out of ten female journalists in Afghanistan are no longer in their jobs. But some have resisted. What is the life of female journalists like now? Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

The most wonderful time of the year. Although, let's be honest, around the holidays, things really add up. But here's the good news. Only at Verizon, you can get a single line for $50 per month when you switch and bring your phone. So while ice skating for two is definitely costing more, here at Verizon, you can save. Gifts for your third cousins? Steep.

All this to say...

During the holiday season, when everything is costing more, you can get more for less right now at a local Verizon store. $15 monthly promo credit supplied over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G, 4G, LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional terms apply.