Pratique du Shadowing: Bans on social media and phones: what's the evidence? - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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Hello, it's Hannah Gelbart here.

Welcome to this episode of what in the world from the BBC World Service.

Today we're talking about your phone.

You may have just checked yours I don't know, it's a bit of a reflex.

I keep on grabbing mine to check for notifications and messages.

It feels like if I were to leave my phone at home for even just a few hours, there's this like sense of dread in the pit of my stomach.

I'm totally hooked on it. And as long as there have been smartphones, we've been talking about whether children should have them.

Should they be allowed in schools, what kind of age limits should there be on social media?

But what evidence is there that smartphones are actually bad for us?

And what are students make of it?

Here to talk us through it is Hayley Clark, BBC journalist. Hi.

Hi, Hannah. Thank you so much for having me.

Welcome to our. Studio. Thank you, I love it.

Um, right. So I thought if we're going to be talking about teenagers and their phones and we're going to be talking about schools and whether they should be banned, we have to be really honest as well, because I don't know about you.

But like every week my phone tries to tell me my screen time and I quickly flick it away in like fear and shame.

So I want you to go to your settings, okay?

Okay, getting them up.

And if you go to your screen time, there should be a little purple egg timer.

My heart's actually beating really fast. I'm quite scared.

Right. Are you ready?

We're gonna we're going to have a look and then show each other. Okay.

Three. Two. One.

Mine floating. Well, mine got there first.

I made it out. Show me. Let's see. Okay.

It's four hours and 14 minutes every day.

Four hours and 14 minutes. Yeah.

Four hours and 14 minutes of time spent or wasted on on this.

Mine's still spinning around. I'm really surprised about this because I've set time limits on most my apps, like Instagram.

After being on it for like 15, 20 minutes a day, it tells me you have reached your time limit and you know what I do?

I press ignore limit.

Every day and then it just makes you feel sad.

Like mine does. Like it says, you're going into sleep mode.

And then I just again flick it away and just pretend I'm not sleeping.

Maybe my phone just doesn't want to show me. It knows I'm not.

I'm not ready for this information. It's come, it's here, it's come.

Okay. Christmas is.

Coming. I think that's been that's been a malfunction because mine says three hours 29.

But that is definitely lower. It's usually like tipping towards five, I would say. What are your most used apps.

I can tell you without without even looking. Yeah.

WhatsApp and Instagram. What about. You. Yeah.

Mine are the same with some embarrassing ones thrown in like eBay and Amazon and Hinge.

I have ADHD and I just cannot resist.

So the notifications, the distractions, I'll go on it for like actually useful purposes.

Maybe internet banking, maybe to read something on the news, maybe to reply to a message I actually need to see and I just cannot resist.

Then the other notifications and the dopamine hit that comes from from scrolling.

I can't have like an unread notification.

I can't have an unread email like that gives me anxiety.

I have to make sure that all of my notifications are checked, and then there's like a kind of constant element of doing that to just make sure that all my ground is covered, that I've got a clean slate so that I can think about other things I understand.

Oh, not healthy. Um, I don't know about you.

I think I'm using my phone way too much.

Like, how does it compare to the average?

So it's hard to get sort of a consistent, um, account around the world.

But some statistics say that adults like over 18 are using their phones for almost five hours a day.

So kind of towards my like us higher one exactly like us.

It makes me feel slightly less less guilty.

Um, and actually the centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimated screen time, um, like screen time overall for 11 to 14 year olds as nine hours a day, um, and 7.5 hours hours.

Okay, that actually that makes me feel a bit better about my, uh.

But we didn't add in our computer and TV time and all of that.

So that screen time overall, I think so, yeah.

Um, and also nearly half of teens self-report that they use the internet almost constantly.

So it does seem like the data is showing that phone use and screen time is just consistently rising.

So it kind of makes sense, right, that some countries are now talking about bans or restrictions or limits on phones and social media use, which are the main countries that are talking about it.

So in 2023, a UN report recommended that smartphones should be banned in schools.

They said to reduce classroom disruption and protect kids from online bullying.

And there's lots of different countries trialling lots of different things.

So in France, there is a trial happening called a digital pause, where over 200 schools are asking teenagers to hand in their phones at reception.

Um, here in the UK, it's a big topic, it's a big debate.

And, uh, the government's looking at legislation to potentially ban under 16 from social media.

And in the US it kind of varies state by state.

But in Florida, um, a bill has passed to ban social media for under 14, and that's going to come into force in January 2025.

Um, and Australia wants to go further than this, um, and wants to go further than banning phones in schools.

So Australia's government says it will introduce world leading legislation to ban children under 16 from social media.

And I saw that the Australian prime minister said, like parents, we're listening to you. So a lot of the rhetoric and debate kind of seems to be people in power and parents.

I'm not sure how much the teenagers and young people are being involved in these discussions.

Um, and Hannah Ritchie is a BBC journalist based in Australia, and she's going to tell us a bit more about what's going on there.

The Australian government is proposing to ban all children under the age of 16 from social media.

There's a lot that we still don't know, and how this will be enforced or implemented needs to be decided by Australia's internet regular, which will happen over the next 12 months before these laws come into effect.

But so far, here's what the government has said.

They say, well, we know exemptions for kids with existing accounts or those who can get parental permission.

Tech companies will face fines for not complying, and messaging services and gaming sites will be exempt, which has prompted questions over the status of apps like Snapchat and how regulators will ultimately define what is and isn't a social media platform.

The government has said it's trialling age verification technology to make all of this possible, but there's very few details about how that technology will work and if it will work, as well as privacy concerns over the risks involved, as it might entail collecting a whole generation of users ID documents.

Overall, parents and families have applauded the proposed ban, but the tech companies themselves have warned it could push children into more unregulated parts of the internet, while experts have criticised it as too blunt an instrument.

They say that the evidence base isn't solid, and also that the focus should be on tougher regulation to make platforms safer, as well as educating kids about how these platforms work rather than just cutting them off altogether.

It's really interesting, she said. There isn't a solid evidence base.

So what evidence do we actually have that smartphones, you know, affect our brains, our mental health?

I think that's really still emerging. So you're absolutely right.

Scientists don't agree on this.

Some scientists say we definitely have data.

We know smart. We know phones are bad for young people's mental health.

But then on the other side, some scientists argue there's not robust data we don't know yet.

And actually more needs to be done over longer periods of time to say whether this is definitely an issue.

And so there's one guy who's American and he's written a book which has had loads of publicity.

He's a social psychologist called Jonathan Haidt.

And this is him talking about his theory.

It's the complete transformation of childhood that took place between 2010 and 2015, so that before then, hardly any kids had a smartphone.

They didn't have high speed data plans, they had to pay for their texts.

So you couldn't really be online for six hours a day before 2010.

You had a flip phone. By 2015, everything's changed.

The great majority have a smartphone with a high speed data plan.

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They have an Instagram account, and now they can be on ten hours a day and they're on more than ten hours a day in that even when they're not, they're thinking about it.

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And so my argument is that human childhood evolved for young people to play, learn social skills, learn adult skills.

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And they used to do that. But once we developed this phone based childhood, it just blocks almost every avenue of development.

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And that's why we see for boys and for girls, an elbow, a bend in the mental health stats. They all begin going north.

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They all began going up, up, up the rates of mental illness around 2013.

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There's some really stunning data just out now.

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Now that we're past Covid and we have, you know, kids have been in school for a couple of years and what you see is a little increase from Covid, but this is on like a mountain range going up from baseline to the top of Mount Everest.

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And along the way, just near the top, you do see a little spike that's Covid, but Mount Everest is from the phone based childhood.

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It's not from Covid. It was. Covid didn't leave a lasting mark in anything like the way the transformation of childhood did.

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And those graphs, those numbers were going down a little bit in the 20 tens for the millennials, you know, born in 1981 to 1995, they have actually pretty good mental health.

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And it was getting slightly better. And then when the first member of Gen Z born 1996, when that first kid got a smartphone and an Instagram account and moved her life onto that, that cut off real relationships with other kids.

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Going back to the arguments, what are some of the what some of the other evidence.

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So a big study in Norway was really kind of making waves across the world this year.

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So it was a longer term study than, than others that have existed and what it found, what its results showed was that smartphone bans in schools meant less bullying, better mental health and better outcomes for teenagers, particularly girls from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

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So that was a really interesting study and is one that scientists have told me have has really kind of propelled the debate, particularly around like parents who are campaigning for phones to be banned in schools.

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Um, but what the professor I spoke to said is that there was variation in the study. So some schools were a lot more, a lot more strict and others were more lenient.

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And he said that there isn't enough evidence to show that a strict ban is really necessary and that in many cases maybe a more lenient ban.

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So say, for example, where um, students could keep their phones on them but just not use them in class.

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He said that actually that can be just as effective as the stricter side, where maybe you hand in your phone to reception in the morning at school.

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Um, so like I said, there's lots of academics who maybe disagree that phones should be banned and social media should be banned for under 16 seconds.

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And one of those is the professor I mentioned before.

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So that's Professor Pete Etchells, and he told us this.

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I haven't yet really been any good studies, you know, things like randomised controlled trials that look at what the potential positive or negative effects of bands might look like, especially in the long term.

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Anecdotally, though, we know that in situations where children and young people have had their access to digital tech restricted, those sorts of regulations tend to backfire.

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So in South Korea, for instance, a law was passed in 2011 to prevent young people from accessing the internet between about midnight and six a.m.

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and this was so that they could get more sleep.

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But actually it only led to an extra minute and a half of sleep per night, and it increased the amount of time that they spent on the internet.

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It just happened earlier in the day.

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There's nothing magical about the age of 16.

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That means that if you get a phone at that age, you'll suddenly just know how to use it appropriately.

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What we need to be doing is thinking about how do we support people of all ages, especially children and young people, in developing healthier habits and healthier relationships with digital tech so that whenever they do get their own smartphone, they're properly equipped to use it in a safe way.

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If we can have more sensible, rational conversations about what we like and what we really don't like about the technologies that are a part of our day to day lives, then actually we can better hold tech companies to account.

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And what we ultimately want to do then is make sure that they put our well-being and our safety at the core of their design, and not treat it as an afterthought. Around this whole debate.

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It's really interesting because it's hard to determine what is correlation and what's causation.

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So whether yes, you can see in the data that mental health for teenagers is is appears to be getting worse.

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But some some scientists and academics are arguing that maybe that's because the conversations around mental health are happening more often.

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And actually we have the language about anxiety and depression that maybe we didn't have back in 2013.

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So it's really difficult to know it, whether it is a correlation or whether the phones are actually causing these mental health issues.

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Let's hear from some of the people who would be affected by these bans if they were introduced now. Hi, I'm Sonia.

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I'm 16 years old and if I couldn't use my phone at school at all, I feel like honestly, I'd be pretty okay with that since I like socialising with a lot of my friends during the day anyway.

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Um, but I would feel a little unsafe if I couldn't contact anyone if I got into trouble, and if I couldn't access any social media until I was 16 or 17, I feel like I would, um, not be as knowledgeable as I am about real world experiences and a lot of struggles that a lot of people go through, because I get a lot of stories about people's personal experiences through social media.

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Um, and it really just gives me like an insight into people's daily lives, um, through, like in different places in the world and what different people go through and different living conditions.

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So I feel like if I didn't have social media until I was older, I wouldn't be as aware of, um, my surroundings.

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And here are some school students who sent us voice notes from France.

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So my name is Isar.

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I'm 16, I'm in high school.

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In my opinion, the digital experiment that's happening in France is a great idea, but I'm still for the fact that students in high school can have their mobile phone because with the help of their mobile phones, they can be more independent.

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They can manage their own schedule.

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There are appointments. There are all the notes.

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I think, in my opinion, to manage all of this.

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And for the students in media, schools are too young and need to stay away from all these distractions of the phone because the phone can have a true impact on their life.

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Hi, my name is Arlene and I'm 17.

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In our high school we use most of the time our smartphone, except when we are in the class with the teacher.

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So we use our phone everywhere in the high school.

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So for me, this experiment might be a very good idea in the high school.

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Uh, because it's very important to take polls, you know, and to draw away from the screen.

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Otherwise you become addict and you start to do nothing and to be a sedentary person.

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For me, for example, when I'm not with my friends, I'm 30, obviously, but most of the time I use my phone to watch some video.

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So it's very important to take a pause and to discover it.

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Something about your high school or to go in the library to read.

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See you soon. Bye. Hello, my name is Richard and I'm a 16 year old second year high school student.

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Uh, there are so many times where I've just seen people, uh, lock themselves in the bathrooms to use the phone or, like, film TikToks or just, uh, people waiting for the opportunity to, like, quickly whip out their phone and use it a little bit.

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And I just found that very annoying.

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And I feel like the newer generation, or myself included, can really have trouble focusing for a long period of time just because of all the content we watch, or just getting easily distracted by the phone.

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So, Haley, how have the phone and the social media companies responded to calls for bans?

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So not many of the companies have commented, but meta, who own Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has raised concerns about how age verification would work.

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Um, and the amount of personal data that might need to be shared.

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So meta and meta is also argued that app stores run by Google and Apple should be the ones to enforce these age restrictions, um, and age verification rather than the apps themselves.

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Um, some apps are starting to to introduce protections for younger users.

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So Instagram has teen accounts, um, and they have default private settings and sleep mode.

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And meta says this will limit the contents teens can see as well.

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So tech companies are trying to do things to reduce the amount of time that people are spending on phones, and also like the harmful material they can access.

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But what can I do to try and get some of my life back for hours a day or more?

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I'm spending on on this thing.

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Like, what can I do to try and fix that dependence?

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Well, you could do like the extreme option, which some teenagers are doing around the world, which is just to abandon your smartphone altogether and get a brick phone.

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Not even a digital detox like, not have a smartphone.

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I think some people do a mixture. So maybe you would have a smartphone, but then when you're going out, you take a brick phone.

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So you've still got that safety element, but you're not going to be distracted by something.

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I don't think I could because I like I need the maps, I need the taxi apps, I need to plan my journeys.

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Or my ADHD coach did recommend.

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So back in the start of the year, I was really thinking about this a lot.

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And like New Year's resolutions were coming around and I was like, I'm going to do it. This is the year I'm going to like, crack it with my phone and just, like, not use it as much.

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Um, obviously totally failed as we've seen on my screen time, but, um, my ADHD coach was recommending I make a little box and he was like, decorate it really nicely, and you can have this thing called phone in a box time where you put the phone in, and it's not a punishment because it's all decorated.

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It's all really nice and pretty. Obviously, I never even made the box.

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Like putting the phone to foam bed.

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Yeah, but I'm talking about maybe next year, maybe next January.

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Hayley, thank you so much for coming into the studio and and revealing my sins. Thank you so much for having me.

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I will try and practice what I preach as well.

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And thank you for joining us. I'm Hannah Gilbert.

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This has been what in the world from the BBC World Service.

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You can get in touch with us anytime. You probably have to use your phone for it. So I don't know if that's very helpful, but we are on WhatsApp, we're on Instagram. We are, of course, here on YouTube.

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You can leave us a comment below and we'll be back with another episode soon.

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See you then. Bye.

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Pratique du Shadowing: Bans on social media and phones: what's the evidence? - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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