Will the social media ban protect kids from AI?

Hello, and welcome to Raising Generation AI, with me, mum of two, Holly Green.
And me, AI expert Fiona Morgan.

This podcast is all about the complicated world of parenting and AI, because I’m a mum, and I’m a bit worried about it all.

And this week, we’re asking the big question, will the social media ban protect kids from AI? And later on, we’re speaking to Dr. Catherine Knibbs, who’s been very vocal that she thinks it’s not going to work.

Now, normally, our podcasts are made with the idea that your kids might be listening in the background, so we’re careful about what we say. But the social media ban has brought up some topics of conversations that might not be suitable for younger listeners. So we recommend, for this one, you stick your headphones in or give us a listen while the kids are at school.

Now, you might be wondering why a podcast about AI is doing an episode on the social media ban.

Now, if we look at the reasons for the social media ban, harmful content, bullying, blackmail, addictive design, those kinds of things, actually all that’s pretty much powered by AI. AI chooses what it is that gets shown, it pushes things to go viral, and sometimes it’s even creating that harmful content, right, through generating images and things like that. So it felt like a good place for us to have a bit of a conversation about it.
And you may have also noticed that AI companions were mentioned in the announcement. Now, don’t worry, we are going to get to that. We’ve had it planned for a while.

Next week’s episode is all about AI companions. So we’re going to leave it alone for this one and focus on the social media ban. With that in mind, Holly, the social media ban, you’re a parent, two young children.

What are you thinking?

I was so pleased when they announced this ban. And I think pretty much every parent I’ve spoken to feels the same. I mean, a lot of my friends have quite young children.

Some of them have older children. I think so many of us think back to our childhoods and how we were just hanging out with our friends. We were going to parties.

We were doing things in the real world. Whereas I look around now, firstly at teenagers, I look around at teenagers. And to me, they just all seem to have their heads and phones the whole time.

I see them walking in groups to school and they’re not even looking at the roads or talking to each other. They are just looking at their phones. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is I think devices are being used by younger and younger and younger children, maybe not always with social media, but still they are spending a lot of time on devices. I haven’t had this myself, but I’ve had friends who have kids or maybe six or seven-year-olds and they’ve had play dates where a child has come around to their house and that child has brought with them a tablet or a phone and just spent their whole time wanting to use that phone or tablet, putting the parent in an awkward position because they’re thinking, well, do I take the device off this child? They’re not my child, is that appropriate?

But equally watching their own child not have a play date because the other child just isn’t interested in them. I know there are going to be arguments against it. I know it’s going to be difficult to enforce.

I know, for example, that it may be that it’s harder to force tech companies to regulate and moderate information if supposedly children aren’t on it. But I just think it gives parents and schools more power, it gives them more authority to keep their children off these platforms. Because I don’t know about you, I struggle with feeling addicted to my phone and feeling addicted to social media, and I hate it.

I don’t want to feel that way. I find myself, for no reason at all, picking up my phone and just checking nonsense. And it’s such a waste of time and life.

I mean, I would, I’m so old school. I would love us all to go back to like the 90s, where we all had Nokia 3210s and played a bit of snake, had 10 text messages, and that was it. I don’t know, I just feel like phones take over our lives, and that’s just not what I want for the kids.

Sorry, that was a bit of a rant, wasn’t it?

It’s fine. I think we need a social media ban for Holly.

If that came in, I wouldn’t be disappointed. How do you feel? Just out of interest.
I think there’s going to be a lot of people like you, and it’s hard to understand. I don’t think anyone knows what the ban is going to look like exactly. There’s going to be technical nuances to it.

Everything’s got pros and cons. I don’t really have much of an opinion. As I said, I don’t have children, so it’s difficult to feel particularly strongly about it, because I’m not dealing with it regularly.

But for me, I would prefer, I think, to see more regulation on addictive design. And I think adults would benefit from that as much as children. I think for me, that’s more of a problem.

But I get, it’s so hard. How do you regulate? How do you sort that out?

I have no idea.

At the moment, it just feels like individuals against a multi-billion pound industry. And I feel like at least with this ban, kind of, it doesn’t level the playing field, but it just swings a little bit more in the individual’s direction.

I think I’d like to see the government hold the companies to account more so than just removing it. But as I said, that’s coming more from a more general perspective of, I would just like to see technology designed better, and put ethics and safety at the forefront of what we’re making, rather than that. But I can absolutely see what the benefit of removing that from children is.

So I’m firmly on the fence, which is an interesting place to be. But it’s useful because our guest that we’re going to speak to in a moment, Dr Catherine Knibbs, is firmly over the other side of the fence. So I think we’re going to have a really interesting conversation.

So this should be a very balanced podcast at least, shouldn’t it? We’ve got someone very firmly for, someone very firmly against, and you right in the middle.

Exactly. And the idea is that we just want to have a nice conversation about it, ask the questions that people might have, find out what Catherine has to say and get her to explain. And hopefully the people then are listening can make their own decision and their own mind up about where it is that they sit, whether they’re on the fence with me or over with Catherine or over with you.

But we’ll chat to Dr Catherine Knibbs right after this.

Australia have already done it, and the UK are going to be doing it in spring 2027. That’s right, we’re talking social media ban. Now whilst Holly thinks this is a step in the right direction, Dr. Catherine Knibbs has been very clear that she thinks it’s not going to work.
So we invited her on the podcast to explain to you why. That way you can make up your own mind on where you sit with it all. Dr. Catherine Knibbs, welcome to Raising Generation AI.

Thank you for having me.

Just to start off with, what is your understanding of what the government is trying to achieve with this ban?

Do you know, it might help the audience understand where I’m coming from if I give a little bit, and I’m going to do this very quickly, a little bit of a background. So my background is I’m an engineer by trade, and I’ve worked in what used to be called IT for over 30 years. I am now a consultant, child and adult psychotherapist, and I’ve been working with the effects of online harm for about 17 years.

So I have a foot in the technical landscape, the technological understanding, and I have a foot in the space where I have dealt with all of the forms of online harms for 17 years. And what I would say is the government is attempting to regulate the tech platforms. That’s their main approach.

And this is on the back of the Online Safety Act, which, to give you a very brief description, is the way that we regulate. So we don’t punish, we don’t control. We regulate the kinds of platforms, websites, services that come into the United Kingdom.

And on the back of that, in order to protect children under the Online Safety Act, there has been a political move to hold the tech companies accountable, where we’re probably going to go in the conversation today is why it hasn’t been the most robust approach, and it hasn’t been an approach that’s going to protect children, sadly.

Give me a sense first of all, this ban coming in in the spring, what will it encompass? Or what do we know so far about what it will encompass?

So at this point in time, it’s 10 platforms that are going to be asked. So there’s not a demand, but they’re going to be asked to regulate people who visit their platform. And what that means in practice is, let’s take one of the biggest platforms, Meta or Snapchat or TikTok.

They will have to assess who it is that’s on their platform. And anybody who is perceived to be or is identified as being under the age of 16, will be effectively kicked off, booted off, banned and their account suspended. How that is going to take place is the bit that’s difficult.

And at this point in time, there’s also conversations around what are known as the workarounds. This is the circumvention which children are discussing. And within the first hour of the announcement, we’re discussing on the very platforms that they’re going to be bought from.

There is also a potential that we are going to be regulated on virtual proxy networks or virtual private networks. It depends on where you come from in the tech industry as to how you talk about these particular pieces of software.

Just to cut in there, sorry, so you’re talking about VPNs there. And this is the technology that people can effectively pretend they’re sort of in another country to access platforms that they wouldn’t normally be able to. Is that right?

Yeah, so a VPN is a piece of software that’s been around for a very long time. And when it comes to, if you think about countries around the world where there are incredibly difficult processes and people are not allowed to access the internet, for example, the war zones, and I’m going to keep it as politically tight as that, the war zones, there are people who use VPNs in order to highlight and discuss the kinds of things that are taking place in some of these countries. And VPNs are a very, very large business product.

I use them when I’m working with my therapy clients. We discuss why we need to use them in order to protect and give them a level of privacy, and the government may well be regulating those pieces of software. Again, almost chasing the tail of the donkey, because it’s going to be really difficult to regulate a lot of these platforms.

So kind of going back to what I was saying, the 10 platforms are going to be asked to identify under-16s, and this is a bit of a problem. In terms of your children’s privacy, your privacy, your identity details, and in order to identify 16 and under, we’re going to be using facial recognition software, uploads of personal identification, what we call biometric data, and there are instances where these companies may well keep that data. There is no regulation of what they’re going to do with that data.

And having a background in technology and privacy and cybersecurity and data protection, that’s the bit that irks and worries me, because we are outsourcing and asking these companies to hold on to your children’s data as part of this band process.

Couldn’t we just, with, say GDPR, just stop them keeping the data? Wouldn’t it be as simple as that?

How would we know? Given the trust we have in the big tech companies, how would we know? We could ask.

However, what we haven’t done in terms of a regulatory system is say, these are the companies we are going to use, for example, in the UK. Bearing in mind, this is a borderless global society. Within the United Kingdom, we would need to say, OK, we’re going to use this particular platform for biometric data, this particular platform for age assurance and age verification, which are two slightly different processes.

And then what would happen is, for example, that would be then retained by the government. We don’t have that. And what has been asked in this process is that third party companies, which also includes big tech, are the ones who need to identify whether it is a child or not on the platform.

Yeah, it sounds like there’s going to be problems regulating exactly who is and isn’t allowed on the platforms. To wind it back a little bit, my big thing, and I think this is probably the position the government is coming from as well, is just that I want my kids not to be spending so much time on screens and on social media. My kids are still young, but I look at kids who are a bit older in particular, and they just seem to be living a life online.

And you know, maybe this makes me a complete bloodite. I just think living in the real world is so much healthier. And to my mind, the social media ban is going some way, hopefully, towards addressing this.

Do you think there is an issue there with children and young people spending too much time online? Do you think there is an issue there, but we just need to tackle it in a different way, or do you think it’s not an issue?

When you are talking to somebody in the corporeal world, I’m going to define that as a world that is tangible, one that we can physically touch and feel. You look at a person, you make eye contact, you have a conversation, it’s generally reciprocal. I say something, you say something, there’s a turn taking.

When we watch media, there is a different process taking place, and sometimes we can be interacting with that media, and sometimes we can be passive viewers, right? So, when a child is looking into a device, you have to understand what the modus operandi is, and what it is that they are engaging with, and what the process is behind that. It’s really hard to accurately define what we mean by real and not real.

Okay, so this is beginning to sound a little bit like a psychotherapist. If children are talking to their friends in WhatsApp, or they are playing Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and they are online with their friends, then what they’re actually doing is communicating with their friends. What we see as a parent is a child staring at a screen.

We don’t see a child communicating in the same way, because what we tend to do is we focus in on this physical nature of the tool, rather than the medium. Does that make sense? Because this is a portal.

It is a portal of communication to other people, whether that is text, voice, immersive environment, or, as we often say, online.

I hear what you’re saying. And to some extent, I do agree with you. But I also think a lot of what kids are doing online isn’t that.

It’s scrolling through TikTok or Instagram and just mindlessly watching stuff. And surely that can’t be good for anyone. I mean, I always think when you’re idle, that’s when you have your best ideas, that’s when you’re creative, that’s when you allow your brain just to think.

And I think so often now, we’re just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and it just feels utterly mindless to me, but also addictive. And so that is where my, well, one of my bigger concerns would lie. Now, we talked about teenagers finding ways to get around this ban, but even if only some children are not on those platforms, even if only some children aren’t exposed to inappropriate content, surely that’s at least a step in the right direction?

In simplicity, yes, and the reason I say that is even in my research, okay, I interviewed seven to ten year olds, which is quite the privilege in research. These seven to ten year olds that had seen traumatic material, their response was, we shouldn’t have to see it. There should be people who take that stuff off, which actually they referred to as inappropriate content.

What they mean is, we got frightened by something that we should never have been frightened by. And whilst we cannot protect all children, I am in the world of safeguarding. Safeguarding means we protect children from risk, and we have to understand the risk to be able to protect them from it.

I would love to have seen this instigated right at the outset of the internet, but unfortunately, this is why we are in the pickle we are at the minute, because we didn’t set our stall out effectively at the beginning, and children have suffered and will continue to suffer. And the best we can do is the best we can do. And right now, whilst I am not hopeful that the ban is going to protect all children, it is going to protect some children.

I am not anti-protecting children, even though if you watch my social media, you will think I am anti-the-ban, anti-the-government, anti-this. I am anti-rushed political decisions with policies that are fragile.

I completely agree with what you are saying here, Cath. And we have talked a bit about the cybersecurity implications of having to do these checks on social media. And the perfect thing would be to regulate the tech industries against these, in my view, unethical design practices.

But the reality is that I can’t see that coming in anytime soon. I just don’t think the government is going to take those kinds of steps that’s needed. But do you have any advice for parents who are looking at their kids on social media and thinking, or even on any of these platforms that aren’t in the social media ban, and have any advice for things that they might be able to do?

So what we have to do is we have to be involved in our children’s online lives, if we’re calling them online lives. We have to have a system and a way of understanding what they’re doing, how they are behaving in those environments, and the kinds of risks that they are exposed to. And the risks generally come under what we call four Cs.

There’s content, conduct, contact, commercialism. Conduct is how people behave. Contact is who can be in contact with your child, and who your child can contact.

Content is the kind of content that children can be exposed to, and I do want to highlight what we consider traumatic for children as adults is far, far less that actually causes the trauma for children. And then commercialism is the kind of things that can happen to their data, and the kinds of adverts they can encounter. And I’m going to add in something which has come out of the PhD, which the social media ban will not touch, which even if we regulated all of the platforms on the planet, it would not touch.

We have to remember siblings, cousins, parents and other media spaces within the home. Children in my PhD told me they were traumatised by what parents were playing on their phones, what they were playing on the television, what they were playing through Netflix, Prime, all of the kinds of channels. We have to remember children are present in the room, whether that is a physical presence in our homes or when we are producing content for the internet, for example, and some of that also includes the risks of putting our children’s faces online.

I’m not saying we can’t show children engaging in things online. However, until we can regulate the services and organisations, faces are something that we need to be blocking, turning, covering up or changing in some way, shape or form. That is the best advice for any of us.

And the other one is ensure that children have a good relationship in the real world.

So going back to that conversation earlier, e-safety begins in the first year of life. If we don’t get our needs met out here, we will go looking in there and there are plenty of perpetrators and tech companies willing to exploit those needs.

I hear what you’re saying, but I also think regulating what your child is doing online might be easy when they’re little, but the older they get, the more independent they get, the harder that gets. And let’s face it, most teenagers are probably far more tech savvy than their parents are. So how do you realistically monitor what they are doing?

The same way that you would if they were, let’s just talk teenagers for a moment. Teenagers have inherently, our generation was no different than the generation before, inherently smoked underage, drunk underage, had sex underage. We have conversations, we have regular conversations.

And in the technological spaces, yes, children are going to hide some of what they’re doing. And this is why I’m a little bit concerned about this social media ban, because what I’m being told, and I have been told over the last couple of weeks, certainly from any of the spaces I’ve been into, is these teenagers have said, I am not being told what to do. I am going to circumvent this.

I’ve got parents saying, I will just, you know, I’ll put in my identity as a plus 18 year old. And I’m concerned about the higher levels of risk that will now occur. And this means that we have to have more conversation.

We have to be talking to children, and we have to think about what this might mean, certainly for the professionals who are listening, the teachers, the safeguarding staff, the therapists, the social workers. We need to think about what this is going to mean for us in terms of our ability to have those conversations and what children are going to be willing to share. So certainly, there are products, and I have worked with a company that produced an AI system that can monitor what a child’s doing and educate the child, rather than, as children would say to me, being grasped up.

And that system will help them understand exposure to sexual content, exposure to violence, exposure to particular points of view. And it really helps the young person understand, did you know interacting with this kind of content can change the way in which you view other people because of dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, and signpost them, and children may or may not listen. And this has always been the distinction between the adults and the teenagers.

Is the teenagers want to be teenagers? So, you know, you could buy products, you can buy services that will, they’re often called spyware in terms of how children report them. There are services that will do that for you.

What I will say is certainly as a psychotherapist, the most important part of an adolescent’s maturity is being trusted and knowing that they’re trusted. And that comes from allowing children to meander, to go into spaces that could and do hold risks. That is a part of being an adolescent.

But if it’s a government ban, it’s not like you’re having to say to your child, I don’t trust you. It’s just, this is the law. In some ways, I think it just empowers parents and perhaps schools to regulate those things.

Instead of being one parent fighting against what feels like this sort of huge tech industry, you can say, actually, look, legally, you’re not allowed on these platforms, so let’s stay off them. And if you have a good relationship with your child, hopefully, that’s what they’ll do. And also, I feel as well, there might be more of an issue with, say, young teens now, let’s say, who are already on these platforms, who are going to be banned in spring and feel that this is an outrage has been taken away from them.

But for younger children who aren’t already on them, is it going to be such a big deal? If they’re not on them, are they going to be that fussed about it?

This is the narrative at the moment is, this ban is not for kind of the children who are in those environments now. It’s a protective measure for children who will be coming into that space. What I can tell you is, having been in this environment for a long time, I suspect the tech companies are going to rearrange, shuffle the deck chairs and produce platforms that are not necessarily considered social media, but do exactly the same thing and hold exactly the same risks.

What I do think is that we need to start really thinking about where the children are going to go if they can’t go into some of these spaces. And the perpetrators of crimes against children are well aware that this is in their favour at the moment and have been gleefully clapping their hands, the same as they did in lockdown when there was much more time spent in the environments. We really need, as a country, to provide something, let’s say, in the real world, where we are replacing.

If we’re going to take something away, we need to be able to give children something to do, somewhere to go, people to be with. And we need to make those environments safer. So certainly the narrative in the last couple of weeks from the children that I work with is, I’m not going out in the streets because there’s people who are, and then they will name many of the issues that they’re frightened of, which include crime, certainly the frightening narrative of the mainstream media, because that has frightened a lot of children.

We really have done a disservice to the way in which we talk about the news and can frighten children, because the children that I work with don’t want to go to the city park. They don’t want to go to a youth centre, if there are indeed any left. They don’t want to go to certain spaces and environments because many of them that I work with are neurodiverse and struggle with social situations.

There are children who are frightened of the communities that they live in. And some of the children have parents who are so affluent that there isn’t anywhere for the children to go. And this is why they’ve been given all of the digital devices.

And it’s such a broad spectrum of how we need to think about this. And it isn’t an easy solution. That’s really where we’re at at the moment.

See, I feel it’s less than mainstream media because I work in news and I am constantly in front of screens with news channels rolling. And obviously there is a lot of negative news. There are, as you say, wars going on, all sorts.

But I think actually social media is a platform where I get a lot of news that can’t be verified in the same way. Do you know what I mean? You listen to people saying all sorts of things on social media and you end up in these echo chambers where you’re fed these same sorts of views over and over.

And actually, I think that is more perhaps where people are getting their view of the world that perhaps isn’t realistic and isn’t represented by what’s actually happening around us. So maybe by coming off social media and getting out more into the real world, we will be, or children will be less scared by the realities of life.

There’s a yes and yes and here in terms of yes, because certainly when I was growing up, the news, if we think about when the news was reported, the 6 o’clock news and the 10 o’clock news kind of reported different levels of information because we had watersheds. And certainly this is something that, you know, children are taking their information on social media. One of the difficulties for many of the children that I have worked with, is they get their information from their parents.

And it’s not always these echo chambers. And actually we need to be able to have conversations about critical thinking, taking that information and having a look at whether it is in an echo chamber, whether it is a robust piece of information. And sadly, just as we’re getting to a place where we understand that’s what we need to do in terms of media literacy, along comes AI with its level of completely being able to skew what we understand as being truth and not truth.

So just coming back round then to the ban, obviously it’s already happened in Australia. Do we have much of a sense of how well it’s working out there?

The results are mixed. I see because of my social media posts, I’ve seen people arguing that it is working, that children are connecting and playing out again. I think the only way we can manage and measure this is when we see, I don’t know, a year, 18 months, two years down the line, what figures change about the real world?

Does crime increase? Does sexual abuse increase? Does loneliness increase?
Do we have other issues? It’s said, and again, the problem with technology is you can never have accurate figures. There is estimations of 70, 71, maybe even 75 percent of children are still using the systems and haven’t effectively been booted off.

And again, I wonder what risks those children are facing in those environments, because social media has not had to change any way that it regulates the content on its platform. Because if we’re moving to a space where we say 16 or 18 to access that platform, then whoever deems a 16 rated piece of content will say, well, that’s what we’re going to put on the platform.

And the way that Australia has implemented this, do you see any differences to how the UK is looking at implementing it? Are there any things we can learn from the way Australia has done it?

It would have been good if that was in the consultation and that had been part of the process. The difference that we have in this country at the moment is we do have the Online Safety Act, and we are leaning in terms of enforcing what we’re doing by relying on the Online Safety Act and saying this forms part of the Online Safety Act. Certainly there is going to be more about identification, so age assurance and age verification that will take place in this country.

That’s one of the differences that we’re going to employ. And certainly the regulation of the VPNs is something that Australia didn’t do. I am aware that chatbots are going to be considered part of this process, and it looks like certain gaming environments might be included as well.

So it could be an online safety approach rather than social media 10 platforms.
Can I ask you a question then to flip this around a little bit? What do you think is good about the ban?

We are having conversations about what children are doing and where they’re going. And 15 years ago when I was saying we need to talk about the environment that children are in, it felt like I was shouting into a void. So I am pleased that we are at a point where we are talking about the kinds of risks children are exposed to.

Sadly, that does mean 15 years of failing the children that went before. I think the conversation around what we’re doing also is raising something that I did in my TEDx talk. It’s also raising the issue of how much time parents spend in their phones and not talking to their children.

It raises the amount of time that we are insulated and disconnected from ourselves and society. This is going a little bit meta. We are having discussions that we needed to have 15, 16, 17 years ago at a minimum.

This episode is based around the question, will the social media ban protect kids from AI? What would you like to say then to summarize your thoughts on that?

No, I don’t think it’s going to ban children from AI because we have the same problems with AI. We didn’t put the safeguards in place at the outset, and that is definitely being communicated by many of the AI ethicists, in terms of conversations that we’re having. I think AI is evolving into spaces and places that we haven’t even considered yet.

And I don’t know what it’s going to bring. I get both excited and a massive fear of trepidation in terms of what it is that we’re doing as a species in the hope that one team, an organization, and person might want to beat another. And in pursuit of ego, we could be possibly creating a societal and species issue.

Dr. Catherine Knibbs, there’s probably a lot of people listening. We’ve referenced your social media antics. Can we call them that

Your social media videos on the podcast today. Where can people find you if they want to come and see what it is that you do?

So I have a website, which is catherineknibbs.co.uk. That is pretty much an informational website and talks about what I’ve done, the books that I’ve written. So just to let parents know, I have seven books of which, if you want to go into the philosophy, neurobiology, you can do that with the early ones.

My most recent book was called Tech Smart Parenting, and it isn’t about tech. It’s about conversations, connecting with your children and how we do that effectively in a world of technology. And you can find me on social media using my name, which is usually Dr. Catherine Knibbs on any of the platforms.

Great. We will make sure we link to all of that in the podcast notes.

Well, there’s a lot of information to digest there. But Fiona, the question we’ve based this episode around is, will the social media ban protect kids from AI? What is your feeling now?

The AI that sits underneath the social media, that addictive scrolling feed that’s purposely designed to keep you coming back, keep you in the app. I guess I’ll have less exposure to that, which is good. But I don’t have a huge amount of confidence that the big tech companies, smaller tech companies won’t just build new services, new software, new apps, that will skirt around the social media ban.

And actually, they will then experience that AI in other ways. And actually, AI is in so many other things that I just don’t think the social media ban is going to touch the surface. And what I would say, we touched it briefly at the beginning of the episode, but AI Companions is actually explicitly mentioned, but it only mentions romantic AI Companions as being restricted.

So we’ll dive into that a lot more next week, but there’s no definition really on what that means. So in short, no, it’s not. I don’t think it’s going to even touch the surface of our children’s AI access.

But more importantly, is anything you’ve heard changed what you think about the social media ban?

So I’m surprised how pessimistic you sound there. I can totally see there are going to be issues with implementation. There are going to be workarounds.

There are going to be problems, of course. But I do feel ultimately, it just gives parents a bit more authority to try to limit their children’s access to these platforms. Because if it is just you and your child and all their friends are on social media and whatnot, I think there’s so much pressure on parents to allow their children to be part of what all their friends are doing.

But actually, if it is illegal, I do think it gives parents that bit more power to say no and not just make it about that individual, but actually, you know, this is a legal thing and I’m doing it for that reason. And I mean, I would compare it to something like the fact that under-18s can’t drink. Yes, under-18s do still access alcohol.

They do still drink sometimes, but I wouldn’t want that decriminalised. I think that probably the fact it is illegal does mean fewer children are drinking less. You would like to think.

So, I don’t know. For me, it is, yes, there are issues, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. But I don’t think we’ll know the outcome for some time to come.

And I suppose I individually won’t know the outcome until my children are a bit older as well. But I think it will be very interesting to see how it unfolds into the coming years.

I agree. I think the difference though, between alcohol and social media is that alcohol is a very clear definition of what alcohol is. I think the social media ban, it’s, I just think tech company, or I don’t want to put this on tech companies.

I just think companies generally are going to be able to skirt around by building technology that doesn’t technically fall into it. You can’t really do that with alcohol, I guess. It’s much easier.

And also, there’s a lot of regulation already around the food and beverages industry on what you can sell. You can’t just make a concoction and sell that. There are loads of other regulations.

So I completely agree it’s a step in the right direction, and I’m for that. But I just think we shouldn’t have too much faith in it, and that it’s going to work. But I’d love to be proven wrong.

So I think the takeaway is probably that even when the social media ban has been implemented, we’re still going to need to keep a close eye on what our children are doing online. And of course, last week, Kirsten Almas stepped down, so I don’t know whether that will have any impact upon how and when this is implemented. So perhaps that remains to be seen as well.

I do know what’s happening next week though. And that is we are talking about AI Companions. I’m really looking forward to this chat.

I think this is going to be really, really interesting because I don’t really know much about them at all, if I’m honest.

It’s been mentioned by pretty much all of our guests. It’s one of the biggest concerns around AI, and we’ve saved it to the very end. We’ve only got two episodes left.

We’ve got the AI Companions next week, and then the week after that, we’re going to just do a wrap. We’re going to do something very similar to our School Report episode from earlier in the season, where we just talk about everything we’ve learned, what we’ve taken away, have we managed to calm any of Holly’s fears whatsoever. And if you’ve got any opinions of what you enjoyed, didn’t enjoy, we’re on social media, Raising Generation AI, and on email podcast at raisinggenerationai.com.

So we’d love to hear from you, and who knows, we might even get you featured on the episode. So please do get in touch.

In the meantime, have a lovely week, and we shall see you next Monday.