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James O'Brien reacts as Keir Starmer announces a social media ban for under-16s. The Prime Minister announced the ban in response to concerns social media is unsafe, making children miserable and could cause lasting damage to their mental health. He acknowledged some youngsters would try to find their way around a ban but said he would not compromise on the “safety and happiness of our children”. Listen to the full show on the all-new LBC App: https://app.af.lbc.co.uk/btnc/thenewlbcapp #jamesobrien #ukpolitics #elonmusk #marckzuckerberg #socialmedia #socialmediaban #keirstarmer #LBC LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK. Join in the conversation and listen at https://www.lbc.co.uk/ Sign up to LBC’s weekly newsletter here: https://l-bc.co/signup
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0:00
I don't think it would be quite as pathetic to look at what Keir Starmer has announced this morning and think
0:05
who can we find who says no, who doesn't like it? Because there will be some, there will be some, what's the word that I want
0:12
Valid reservations. People may be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good
0:16
They may be worried about the logistics. They may be worried about the detail
0:20
They may be worried about delivery, whatever you want to call it
0:24
And they would be wrong. this is possibly going to be Keir Starmer's greatest legacy it is bold it is comprehensive
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it may have gone a little further than some people wanted but I would rather with legislation like
0:43
this that things go too far than not far enough and it will potentially improve and even save the
0:52
lives of countless children. He is removing a cancer from the body politic. He is detoxifying
1:01
the bloodstream of our young people. And it's taken me a while to get to this position
1:07
almost as long as it's taken Keir Starmer. And the reason for that is that, like you
1:12
I look at social media usage through the lens of my own experiences, which I were until Elon
1:22
Musk bought Twitter largely pleasant and benign and albeit that there were occasions where I found
1:29
myself thinking gosh I should probably go out there and do something less boring instead or
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take up bird watching or commune with nature a little more or stop you know constantly engaging
1:40
with people who aren't worthy of one's time this is going back a long long way I didn't have
1:47
negatives and for reasons that I will never fully understand but I'm almost certain that the credit
1:52
It lies with Mrs. O'Brien. My children, who are absolutely of the age
1:56
where you could have expected the bad stuff to happen, were not victims to social media
2:03
have not been plagued by or hurt by social media. So you come at the story, you come at this story
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I think, very, very closely attached to your most personal experience. And the problem, and whenever I say
2:20
my children have not been affected by it unduly. I always cross my fingers, because I don't know for sure, you know, none of us do
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The massive majority of children having the worst imaginable experiences on social media
2:33
are doing so in a world that their parents know nothing about. And this, I think, is the point
2:38
And this is why I greet today's announcement with close to undiluted enthusiasm
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and borderline joy. eight minutes after 10 is the time and i'll tell you why
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you you i can tell you things that will make your hair stand on end some of which you will be aware
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of some of which you won't i my wife is a psychotherapist and works entirely with children
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and that means that she has exposed herself to the technologies and and what what they are
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capable of doing in ways that still shock me as someone who talks about them for a living
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That's a sort of flaw in the media model there. But some of the examples she's mentioned
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make me want to cry for young people today. That there is, for example, an incredibly popular
3:32
subculture on there that encourages self-harm. It doesn't just encourage self-harm, it glamorises
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it fetishises self-harm. There is footage of a young person walking down a tree-lined avenue
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with beautiful music playing in the background and in the middle of that process
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and there's a trigger warning here. And remember, I'm 54 years old
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and I'm talking to you. I'm not sure how old you are, but you're older than the people in these videos
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They're all at school at the moment. And I'm issuing a trigger warning to you
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about something I'm about to say on the radio. Okay, particularly if you have experience
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or knowledge of self-harm. I'm issuing a trigger warning to you as a fully fledged functioning adult
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about something I'm about to say on the radio. Because there no trigger warnings on social media And this stuff if it pops up in your algorithm and you find yourself watching it for a few more seconds than your average engagement then they will pump it into your phone day and night constantly
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But let me tell you what, I always do that when there's something on the horizon
4:35
that I don't really want to say out loud, don't I? I distract myself deliberately
4:40
Trigger warning. So a young woman, a teenage girl, will be walking down a beautiful bucolic idyll
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a tree-lined avenue, birds tweeting in the trees, music playing in the background
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And she will be beautiful and she will be dressed in flowing robes
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and looking ethereal and magical. And as she walks down this idealised image
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she will cut herself in a way that is designed to look appealing and attractive
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And I could weep, telling you that. I could weep like the fathers and mothers we've spoken to on this program
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who've spoken to us about what it's like to have a child who self-harms. I could weep for the fathers and mothers who've spoken to us on this program
5:25
Well, I could weep for their children first, foremost. I could weep for the people who've told us what it's like to deal with eating disorders
5:32
because people who are my age grew up aware of these practices
5:36
self-harm, eating disorders, and other conditions. We grew up in a world where there wasn't really anybody out there
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telling you to do it, telling you it was cool, telling you it was great
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And they do something else as well, these communities, these worlds. They pre-engineer, if that's the word
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They reverse-engineer objection. So you are told that if somebody tries to stop you doing this
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and this would apply to eating disorders and to self-harm and possibly to other things
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they'll tell you that if somebody tries to stop you doing this then they are denying you
6:17
the beauty that is depicted in those images in those videos, in those films
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just put your hand up if that's new to you but not if you're driving, obviously
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I'm talking mostly metaphorically if you didn't know that that stuff was I mean, literally a single click away
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turn on, tune in, freak out a single click away and once it starts
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it's almost impossible to stop it and it does the same with suicide
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they glamorize, they fetishize suicide and the platforms, the adults, the humans
6:56
because I think we use the word platforms a little bit too much the humans who profit from this stuff
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have done next to nothing to stop it it would be hard enough for a fully fledged adult
7:08
to deal with untrammeled and unfiltered access to these kind of horror shows. But we have been allowing our children to wallow in it
7:16
unchecked, unchaperoned, unaided, and largely unaware for years. I'm sorry that it took me a while to come to this position
7:28
because I think I should have been a little bit ahead of the curve on it
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I should have been calling for this in much more explicit and uncertain terms
7:38
for a little bit longer but I'm like you I base my positions on my personal experience even though
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I have this job which means that every day I have access potentially to one and a half million
7:49
disparate diverse and different personal opinions but the more you look into this the sicker it is
7:55
and that that's the extremes then you come to the shallower end that can be just as damaging
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just as dangerous just that the obsession with appearance the obsession with status the entirely
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unrealistic comparisons to people who don't actually exist they just put up false and and
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fallacious depictions of themselves on social media the pursuit the ludicrous pursuit the
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damaging dangerous pursuit of some weird form of physical perfection and these children are so young
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they're so young that sometimes the thirsts that they are sating and the appetites that they are
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feeding are not as is the case with most adults a consequence of trauma childhood trauma that is the trauma the trauma is the interaction with social media the the the thing about boarding school I said this to you a few times is that you can never close the door when you get home at the
8:51
end of the day, because home is school and school is home. And that is a part of the reason why so
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many of us emerge emotionally detached. And what we like to call a thick skin is in fact a form of
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emotional absence because that's what you have to become in order to survive what social media has
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done is rob every child in the world or every child in our world of the ability to close the
9:15
door when they get home at the end of the day and at least not have to deal with this stuff until
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we go back to school tomorrow because even if you manage not to look at it you know it's there
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you know it's there you know i mean most normal people can't walk past a door when they know other
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people are talking about them on the other side of the door without pausing to put your ear
9:38
to the keyhole. And by normal people, I mean people who don't do this kind of thing for a living
9:43
Kids can't do that. Think what you were like when you were 15. If you knew that people were talking
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about you somewhere else, imagine having the ability at the age of 15 to genuinely not care
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about that. Massively unrealistic. Massively unrealistic. So, that's quite a dull opening
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isn't it? Because I'm doing something I can't remember doing. And I'm suggesting to you
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that this is, I mean, of course, it is vulnerable to letting the perfect be the enemy of the good
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but the platforms the people that run the platforms have not just failed utterly to do
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anything about this they have encouraged it they have exploited our children and they have profited
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from it and um although you might have woken up this morning and found yourself thinking well
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that's a bit odd my children use youtube to revise there are some excellent tutorials on there that
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have really helped them with their GCSE revision this summer. That will find a new home. That will
10:48
migrate to a safer place that teachers and parents are much more aware of, much more au fait with
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And yes, of course, children will, like water, find little gaps to seep through and new platforms
11:00
that are currently not even possessed of names we know will spring up and harvest some of these
11:06
people. But you don't turn down a saucepan when you're in a boat that's sinking and you decide to
11:12
help bail it out you don't say no i'll just wait for a bucket please or i'll wait for the lifeguards
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to arrive i'll wait for the rnli you start trying to get as much water out of that boat as you can
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i thought of david hockney would you believe when i was preparing to talk about this this morning and
11:27
the fact that um he was i think was he almost 89 when he died and he smoked like a chimney until
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the very end nobody sensible normal intelligent would cite david hockney as a reason why smoking
11:39
is not bad for you. Nobody would ever say, well, hang on a minute, David Hockney was nearly 90 when
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he died and he smoked like a trooper. No one would ever say, therefore, it must all be lies
11:50
All this stuff about lung cancer, all this stuff about emphysema, all this stuff about smoking
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related illness. Look at David Hockney. He was nearly 90 and he smoked like a chimney
12:02
No one does that, right? Anymore. No one does that anymore. So you don't look at social media
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and say to yourself, well, I'm all right. My kids seem okay. Therefore, this must all be a moral panic
12:15
This must all be exaggerated. And that phrase there, that double-worded phrase, moral panic
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is I think at the heart of why our responses to this are so strange
12:29
Moral panic. Video didn't kill the radio star. Video games didn't end civilization as we know it
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violent films didn't turn us all into feral murderers none of the things that the certain
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sort of commentators and people largely of the right are always warning us or the end of
12:47
civilization as but none of it came to pass social media was and is all of those things
12:53
it has positives it has um good sides it has wonderful um opportunities for people who might otherwise be alienated and isolated to engage with the world in ways that they wouldn ever be able to do so And I don want to be the one to tell those people that they just have to suck it up for the benefit of the greater good
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but that's the way society works. That's the way governments work and that's the way the law works
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You do something because it's the right thing to do and it prioritises the needs and the welfare
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of the most vulnerable members of our society, our population, our children over everybody else, up to and including the people, the humans, not the
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platforms that exploit, that hurt and that profit from our children's pain and misery
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So I can't remember the last time we did a phone-in like this, but join me this morning
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in applauding the government, applauding Keir Starmer and explaining why you welcome, and
13:57
And of course, tell me why you don't welcome it. But I've set my stall out, I think, fairly comprehensively
14:04
So do feel free to treat it like a coconut shot and start lobbing your balls in my direction
14:10
But I can't remember the last time I actually felt in my soul
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that a prime minister had done something absolutely wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Unless you worry about footballification or bias or anything like that
14:24
I think he's dropped more balls than the worst goalkeeper in the World Cup
14:29
I think Keir Starmer has been an almost crushing disappointment as Prime Minister in a million different ways
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And that is why I still can't quite allow myself to relax into this one because they could still fluff it
14:43
They could still mess it up. I can't quite see a U-turn taking place, but it's taken place on almost everything else that some of us have greeted warmly when it was originally announced
14:53
I can't see them undoing this. They seem to have spent a lot of time putting it together
15:00
And I am here for your quibbles and your caveats, but I don't think that they will undermine the point
15:08
about the perfect being the enemy of the good. I just want today you to tell me why you're glad about this
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You can draw upon personal experiences. You can draw upon broader understandings
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you can draw upon knowledge. I just want you to tell me why you're glad about this and whether
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you agree with me that this will actually be Keir Starmer's place in the history books
15:32
This will be the one. This will be the thing that is always remembered. And other countries will come
15:38
in and will fall into place. Eventually, countries where children are allowed access to these hideous
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platforms will be countries that have, you know, incredibly low ages of consent, countries that we
15:50
look at and think are medieval all it is is you are you are not the customer you are the commodity
15:56
they are selling you to their advertisers you are not the customer you you are the currency
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and that's why there is no limit on how much time they want you to spend on there
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they want you to spend 25 hours a day on those platforms 25 hours a day is what they want
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and if you dig deep enough and look in the right places
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they will tell you that. They will tell you that. Why do you think they don't let their own children
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use the platforms that they profit from? They don't let their own children anywhere near them
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because they want you on there for 25 hours a day. Human nature being what it is
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sadly, a lot of the stuff that delivers the biggest numbers is not healthy
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violence of course um all the ancient hatreds get a look in but some of the stuff that delivers 25
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hours a day of usage is um not outwardly dangerous or damaging it's the act of addiction
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that has been commoditized if you want someone to be doing something for 25 hours a day
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you don't care what draws them in or keeps them there. All you care about is that they are drawn in and kept there
17:23
So, how do you know you've got a problem? As an adult
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