The UK government says it has launched pilots involving hundreds of families on social media bans, curfews, and app time limits. These pilots will assess the impact of restrictions on children, including on sleep, family life, and schoolwork. The government also revealed that 30,000 parents and children have responded to the ongoing consultation on children’s digital wellbeing.
The various pilots will be trialed in the homes of 300 teenagers for six weeks to test how the different restrictions affect young people’s day-to-day lives. The trials will involve four interventions, with each family getting one of these.
The first group of parents will be taught how to use parental controls to remove or entirely disable access to selected social media apps to mimic the enforcement of a social media ban at home. The second group will introduce a one-hour-per-day cap on the most popular social media apps for teens, including Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
The third set of parents will have a blanket ban on social media for their children between 9 pm and 7 am, leaving them with access to social media for just a few hours before and after school hours. The last group will continue to give children the same access to social media they already have, these being the control group.
To measure the effectiveness of these measures, parents and children will be interviewed at the start and end of the pilots to help the government understand the impact that limiting social media has had on their family life, sleep, and schoolwork. The interviewer will also ask participants about practical challenges they have faced with controlling social media access, such as their experience setting up parent controls or the workarounds that teenagers have found to bypass them.
Once the data is in, it will be reviewed by government officials and a panel of academics. They will also take into account the public’s responses from the consultation.
The United Nations’ children’s agency, UNICEF, has criticized blanket bans on social media for children, while welcoming efforts to protect children. UNICEF says that children have a right to participate on social media safely via improved platform design and content moderation. It warned that social media bans could push children into unregulated, less safe spaces.