A report from the Youth Select Committee (YSC) has found links between social media and youth violence.
They claim that the algorithms present on social media sites may inadvertently lead to harmful content being promoted, with 25 per cent of surveyed young people saying they were suggested harmful content by the apps algorithm, 35 per cent saying someone had shared the content with them, and half of the respondents saying they had seen violent content on someone’s profile or feed.
The investigation was launched to examine how to reduce youth violence which remains at a higher level than 10 years ago despite some reduction in recent years. The report cites figures from the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) which surveyed 10,000 young people and found that one in five children have been a victim of some form of violence in the past year, while 16 per cent of respondents said they have perpetrated violence themselves.
Their report did “not conclude that there is a causal link between viewing violent content and incidence of real-world violence”, but the YSC suggests that “it does have an impact on young people and how they view violence”.
The content reportedly seen by young people includes fights and assaults, encouragement of self-harm, sales of weaponry like knives (which is illegal under the Online Safety Act) and “gendered hate” promoted by far-right influencers.
To combat this content the YSC has called on the government to implement effective media literacy and online safety lessons in the school curriculum and for online safety to be part of teacher training programmes.
Speaking today in PMQ’s, PM Keir Starmer distanced himself from a total mobile phone ban in schools, a plan pushed by the Conservatives to improve classroom focus and to reduce online bullying and harassment.
He referred to it as “completely unnecessary” and insisted that most schools were managing the use of phones on their own, saying that “the battle” that the government must fight is “to ensure the content that children are accessing, wherever they are, is suitable for their age”
This opinion was share by Wania Eshaal Ahmad, the chair of the Youth Select Committee, who said a “social media ban, like in Australia, is neither practical nor effective. Instead, tech companies must be held accountable. Media literacy must be prioritised so young people can protect themselves and distinguish fact from fiction.”
Ed Davies, leader of the Liberal Democrats, spoke on this issue and the impact of the Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’, a story revolving around a teenage killer influenced by online violence and sexist hate, saying that to “defend our young people from harm” social media giants should be “much more toughly regulated and pay more tax”.
The YSC suggests that to combat the high levels of online hate and youth violence, young people should be given further access to “third spaces”, locations outside of home and work/school where they can “express themselves positively through arts, music, sports or skills development”.
To facilitate this the YSC are pushing for greater funding for youth groups and services from the government and local authorities. This collaboration between national and local actors would also involve “multi-agency approaches to youth violence” and a “rapid evaluation of Violence Reduction Units” and where they have been successful in order to examine what can be done to reduce youth violence and the spread of harmful online content.
