Whitehall’s Battle Royale: Protection and Participation #SocialMediaBan

It’s become a Whitehall Battle Royale: Number 10 wants video games swept into Monday’s under-16 social media ban — minimum age limits, plus a rule that children can only play with people they already know. DCMS is frantically trying to build better blocks before nightfall, and the Prime Minister’s been dragged into the play to politicise gaming whether he likes it or not.

Both sides are seeing the arena through their children’s-safety goggles, naturally — one lot sees nothing but menace to be banned and popularity points, and the other an own goal in the making. Classic Whitehall: leading the race right up to the last-corner pile-up.

But strip away the costumes and this is a fight for the open internet and everyone’s rights online. “Protection” in games is being wielded as a political ploy, when a genuinely rights-based approach would put children’s participation on an equal footing with their safety.

Princess Peach in the Treasury may also lose out. The UK games industry pulls in £8.76 billion in consumer spend a year and adds upwards of £6 billion to the economy.

And the evidence base? There isn’t one — there’s no credible evidence games are harmful at scale in the ways that would warrant a universal one-size-fits-all under 16s ban. Even the merging evidence from Australia says children cut from social media access less news and information, it’s not effective, and over 60% remain on the platforms anyway. The games industry has been far ahead of social media in creating child-safe environments, and experts have queried the data being marched out to justify a ban. LSE’s leading Oracle, Professor Sonia Livingstone, is among the UK’s foremost researchers on children and digital media, who has been one of the sharpest voices warning against rushing in without evidence, and has called out the weakness of the research being used to push it, and punish children.

The suggestions in today’s media that the plans will even include a Cinderella Law to block gamers from playing in certain hours, ignore that it was scrapped after being found not only unworkable, but unpopular, after a decade in Korea.

A government concerned about the effects of social media on mental health might have not cut mental health provision so badly, that today means nearly 40,000 children experience a wait of more than two years for professional support. Policymakers concerned about children’s safety and wellbeing front and centre, would not have overseen local authority funding for youth services in England to fall by 76% in real terms, over the past 14 years. They might listen to and address young people’s climate concerns with the world they are going to live in for longer than us.  What they want is literacy and to be listened to.

There’s no doubt that pitting the player community against politicians will create a movement, and few constituencies mobilise faster or louder than one told that it’s about to lose something it loves. Many already have a vote; all of them are watching. Shut young people out of a decision made in their name and the real casualty isn’t going to be gaming. It’s their trust that politicians will represent them and democracy is worth getting involved with at all.

It seems that for children’s participation online, it is a done deal and indeed, Game Over. The real question is how far Number 10 is willing to knock out young players as collateral damage, just to take the PM’s battle for survival to the next level?