Social media won’t vanish. We must teach teenagers to question it, writes Natasha Devon

We Millennials, Gen Xs and Boomers lived through the technological revolution. After we die, there will be no one left who can remember what life was like before it.

I mention this because it’s key to understanding how young people think about social media. To them, it has always been there, in the same way as we have always lived alongside cars. Whilst many of the teenagers I do focus groups with in schools and colleges throughout the country do acknowledge the harm social media inflicts on their lives, they also don’t perceive it as optional.

There is no distinction in their worldview between the online and offline worlds. It is all one, continuous thing, inextricably enmeshed. That’s why if you ask them how they think what they’re seeing online affects their ‘real world’ attitudes and behaviours, they look at you as though you have got two heads.

Having said that, many teenagers tell me they regret the amount of time they have spent on social media and that, if they become parents in the future, they won’t give their children a smartphone as soon as they had theirs. Like them, I support statutory guidance on when young people should legally be allowed access to phones and social media. I also believe that for the sake of our collective mental health, physical safety and the future of democracy, laws need to go much further in curbing tech companies and regulating online content.

Even if all this happens, though, it won’t make social media disappear. The impact of online harms permeates the lives of those who aren’t active users, including children. Plus, we don’t magically stop being vulnerable at the age of 16. That’s why, alongside stricter regulation, we urgently need to embed the scientific literacy and critical thinking skills that will allow future adults to analyse online content.

Remember when our teachers at school said we had to do mental arithmetic because ‘you won’t always have a calculator on you,’ and now we all laugh because everyone, in fact, has a calculator on their phone? Yet, being able to do mental arithmetic is a useful and important cognitive skill; even so, it’s just the given reason that didn’t turn out to be true.

It’s the same sort of logic with the ability to Google or watch a YouTube video about literally any topic. Most people have a supercomputer in their pocket, containing the sum of all human knowledge. Some of that information is verified, true and useful. A lot of it is literally designed to make us anxious, to mislead us or to radicalise us into extreme ideologies.

Sifting through material, deciphering what is valuable and what should be ignored, is the most important skill any human being can possess in the technological age. This is often referred to as ‘information hygiene’.

If you have a teenager in your life who is already a social media user and you want to practice information hygiene with them, you can try the following:

• Both Google the same question, such as ‘what percentage of immigration to the UK last year was via small boats?’ and see if (as is likely) the search engine gives you two different answers. Explain that the algorithm takes our search history into account, which would be like everyone at school being given a different textbook to study from.
• Go to a verified source such as Full Fact or Reuters and check whose answer was closest to the truth. Explain how important it is to use verified sources to check information before believing or sharing it.
• Show each other your social media feeds and notice the differences.
• Explain to them what an online rabbit hole is. If you show an interest in something on social media, the algorithm will feed you more of that topic, in more extreme increments to keep you engaged (the aim of the algorithm is to keep you online for as long as possible). This can lead to us becoming more polarised in our views, or believing ‘everyone’ thinks or does a particular thing when that isn’t the case.
• Ask them to practice ‘sitting with’ information. If they learn something new online, they don’t need to have an opinion about it or share it immediately. Normalise sleeping on something and seeing if you still have an interest in the topic the next day.

Most importantly, we need to let young people know we’re up for having a conversation around anything that concerns them about their online experiences and that they won’t get in trouble for disclosing them to us.

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Listen to LBC's Natasha Devon on Saturdays from 6-9pm on the new LBC app.

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