Gordon Campbell: On The Parental Panic Over Young Kids Online

Creating a policy group to investigate a R16 ban on social media provides the government with a perfectly designed soapbox. The findings don’t have to end up suggesting anything useful, let alone a practical course of action. Yet in the meantime, the issue enables the government to connect with anxious parents about a scary threat that’s supposedly consuming their kids, and turning their brains to mush. The fact that there is no conclusive research that proves the alleged harms are as widespread or as addictive as claimed appears to make no difference at all.