There’s a lot happening this week, very fast, in the political sphere, about banning social media for teenagers, or banning them from smartphones. I have plenty to say about that, but right now I want you all to focus on this part.
This is my personal touchstone for evaluating proposed regulation about social media, and/or smartphones, where teenagers are concerned. I call it the Darnella test.
Ok, so who’s Darnella?
She’s a fucking hero.
That’s her, in the hoodie, in the header photo of this post, filming the person who was filming her back.
Darnella Frazier was a 17 year old girl who was just walking to the corner shop to get snacks. Just minding her own business, living her own life, in her own community. Going for snacks.
This is what she ended up filming, and posting to Facebook, instead.
Can you just pause, for a moment, and ask yourself if you would have had the composure and the maturity and the presence of mind, at the age of 17, to somehow say to yourself:
just keep calm, and keep filming. That is the only thing I can do at this moment. The world needs to know this.
In her own small way, she really did change the world. It did not go unnoticed.
And yet, here we are again, looking at various proposals to ban young people from social media and/or smartphones. We also have proposals, such as Ofcom’s recent OSA consultation, which would allow them to keep their phones and apps but ban them from livestreaming, because the children.
And if you have never once stopped to reflect on how these sanctimonious proposals, as they always do, come from affluent white upper middle class Mrs Jellybys who live in bubbles of privilege with nannies and au pairs and bottomless budgets for advocacy campaigns run as personal crusades, that’s because you are probably one of them. It’s not just that you’ve never seen a Darnella in your life. It’s that you cannot, for all your power and privilege, imagine what it is like to be in her shoes, every waking minute of every day.
So what I want anyone who is in any position of power or influence to do, as they bring these proposals to fruition, is run the legislative proposal through the Darnella test.
Not for the one above: for the next Darnella.
For any young person who is just going to be walking along the street for a snack and ends up witnessing something that nobody should ever see because it should not be happening. For that young person whose only recourse, at that moment in time, is to document and report.
And as that future Darnella pulls out their phone to document the event:
- Would they be allowed to have that phone, at all, under xyz regulation?
- Would they be allowed to have that social media account, at all, under xyz regulation?
- Would they be allowed to upload video, or livestream content, under xyz regulation?
- Would the video, because of their age-verified account information, be instantly flagged and/or taken down for violent content?
- Would the video, as urgent journalistic content in the public interest, be suppressed and censored based not on the content within it but on the age of the person who filmed it?
That’s your Darnella test. Run through it as if your life depends on it. Because it just might.
Because consider this, as you’re wringing your hands about “the children” and “the smartphones” and “the social media”:
the life that future Darnella might be trying to save could be her own.
It frustrates me that people on the one hand moan the lack of agency in many teenagers whilst simultaneously wishing to take that agency from them.
And it annoys me even more that the tools for protecting them are cheap or even free and generally available. They allow you gradually loosen things off and keep an eye on things. It’s not especially hard, but it does take half an hour of effort to set up, and then a little effort for every new device they get. That should be enough.
As someone commented on my socials, it’s a pathology where parents do things “for” their kids to “protect” them, well into young adulthood and grown adulthood, whilst making them feel guilty for it, which results in the young/adult child assuaging their parent by allowing them to continue the controlling behaviour. The parent, who doesn’t half mind the attention, uses their child’s failure to launch as ‘proof’ that they are immature and should remain dependent on them.
To which I replied, “oh, you met my ex mother in law too?”
There was an astonishing share of this post elsewhere from someone in the “children’s rights” sector, implying what a great opportunity this was for them to create more busywork paperwork makework exercises to play with in their “sandboxes”.
And here was me thinking that the children’s rights sector is really a job creation scheme for highly paid professional white saviours building empires for themselves on vulnerable children’s backs.
And then they just go out and say it.