We have let down teens if we ban social media but embrace AI

If you are in your 70s, you didn’t fight in the second world war. Such a statement should be uncontroversial, given that even the oldest septuagenarian today was born after the war ended. But there remains a cultural association between this age group and the era of Vera Lynn and the Blitz.

A similar category error exists when we think about parents and technology. Society seems to have agreed that social media and the internet are unknowable mysteries to parents, so the state must step in to protect children from the tech giants, with Australia releasing details of an imminent ban. Yet the parents of today’s teenagers are increasingly millennial digital natives. Somehow, we have decided that people who grew up using MySpace or Habbo Hotel are today unable to navigate how their children use TikTok or Fortnite.

Simple tools to restrict children’s access to the internet already exist, from adjusting router settings to requiring parental permission to install smartphone apps, but the consensus among politicians seems to be that these require a PhD in electrical engineering, leading to blanket illiberal restrictions. If you customised your Facebook page while at university, you should be able to tweak a few settings. So, rather than asking everyone to verify their age and identify themselves online, why can’t we trust parents to, well, parent?

Failing to keep up with generational shifts could also result in wider problems. As with the pensioners we’ve bumped from serving in Vietnam to storming Normandy, there is a danger in focusing on the wrong war. While politicians crack down on social media, they rush to embrace AI built on large language models, and yet it is this technology that will have the largest effect on today’s teens, not least as teachers wonder how they will be able to set ChatGPT-proof homework.

Rather than simply banning things, we need to be encouraging open conversations about social media, AI and any future technologies, both across society and within families.