Olly Stephens was a kind, thoughtful, funny 13-year-old boy who enjoyed playing on his XBox, doing wheelies on his bike and eating pizza. He hated unfairness and went out of his way to support those he cared about. When a school friend lost his hair while being treated for leukaemia, Olly shaved his own head in solidarity.
Then, on January 3, 2021, he was lured to the park near his home in Reading by a girl he knew. There, he was ambushed by two teenage boys and stabbed to death. He had seen a video posted to Snapchat of a younger boy being humiliated and forwarded it to the boy’s brother to alert him. This had infuriated the bullies who took their brutal revenge.
The killers were convicted but Olly’s father, Stuart Stephens, thinks there was another culprit too. The murder was prompted, planned and co-ordinated across a number of different social media platforms. “There’s a malevolence and a malice to what people are doing, facilitated by social media,” said Stephens. “Would Olly be here without it? Absolutely 100 per cent. Social media is killing our children.”
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Tim De Meyer, now chief constable of Surrey police, oversaw the investigation into Olly’s death when he was at Thames Valley. He said the most disturbing aspect of the case was the nature of the material the children had accessed online and the associations they had built through social media. “I don’t doubt [social media] is fuelling and enabling crime,” he told me.
“In the past, two young men might have met and got into a row but it took quite a lot of revving up before they got to the point of exchanging blows, whereas now they’re arriving at the situation ready to go.” Would he favour a ban on social media for those under 16? “Yes I would. It just seems to me to be an absolute no-brainer that there should be much greater restrictions.”
Next week The Times Crime and Justice Commission will publish its final report, with recommendations for transforming a criminal justice system that is at breaking point. During a year-long inquiry we have studied everything from knife crime to violence against women and girls, the courts backlog, sentencing, the prisons crisis and the police. We propose reforms in all these areas. The thing that has surprised and shocked me most, however, is the role that social media is increasingly playing in encouraging criminality, particularly among the young. The issue was raised with astonishing regularity by expert witnesses on a range of subjects. The evidence was compelling that under-16s should not be on these platforms.
Dame Lynne Owens, deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and former head of the National Crime Agency, said parents often assumed children were most in danger when they left the house, “but actually the current truth is our children are less safe online in their bedrooms”.
Concern has been growing about the mental health impact of smartphones on the young. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation has become a set text for MPs trying to navigate the intersection between politics and technology. The Netflix series Adolescence highlighted how violence and misogyny promoted on social media can cross into the real world. But the full extent of illegal activity on these platforms, and the danger posed by terrorists and criminals exploiting the connections they create, has not been sufficiently understood.
Pupils promote pre-arranged fights after school on social media, drumming up an audience to witness the violence. Fraudsters manipulate and scam their victims. Paedophiles pose as teenagers to groom children into sending indecent images of themselves. Last year, there were 10,000 arrests in the UK involving online child sexual exploitation.
Alexander McCartney, a 26-year-old man from Northern Ireland, was sentenced to life in jail after admitting 185 charges including manslaughter, blackmail, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and producing and distributing indecent images of children. He had posed as a young girl on Snapchat and targeted over 3,500 children across Europe, the US, New Zealand and Australia.
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There is also a rising national security threat posed by the radicalisation of young people through social media. A fifth of those arrested for terrorist offences last year were children; one in eight investigated by MI5 were under 18.
Matt Jukes, the police head of counterterrorism, told the commission how technology had transformed things since he started working in the field just days before 9/11. “Terrorist groups are now able to radicalise, to share instructions, to share their ideologies,” he said. “The feature which has been driven most by the internet and by online radicalisation has been the emergence of young people in all of that casework.”
Australia has recently legislated to ban social media for under 16s and Jukes said the UK must now consider doing the same. He drew a parallel between social media and smoking. “By 1950, it was clear that smoking was causing lung cancer and killing people but it took decades for governments to decide to regulate. That kind of delay is one we can’t sustain against this challenge.”
Jonathan Hall, the government’s reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned of “chatbot radicalisation” turning young people to violence. “The internet has changed everything,” he said, but the law has not kept up. “Cars can be used for terrorism, they can be used to transport weapons, they can be used to carry out attacks. But we have driving licences, we know what the rules of the road are. With the internet we’re just plunged into this without any rules.”
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Police chiefs across multiple specialisms expressed concern about the extreme violence and misogyny being offered up to teenagers by big tech algorithms. Sarah Crew, chief constable of Avon and Somerset and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on rape and adult sexual offences, compared social media to the Wild West and said “everything” should be tried to protect the young, including a ban for those under 16. “I’m really very worried. Young people are by their nature vulnerable and this gives those perpetrators who would want to do harm a really direct channel,” she said. “It sets norms in people’s minds about what’s acceptable and what’s not. Girls must be looking at things and saying that’s what’s expected of me. Boys are learning something about the superiority of men over women.”
Violence is being normalised
She said society had to do much more to protect children. “I think it is a crisis, like Covid, where all parts of the state and society and the voluntary sector came together and said ‘right this is a real problem’.”
Maggie Blyth, the interim chief constable for Gloucestershire and police lead on violence against women and girls, said harmful content on the platforms was driving behaviour. “We are seeing young people acting out violence and behaviours like strangulation because they see it online. There are horrific things that are being normalised.”
Neil Basu, a former assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said curbs were needed. “I hear a lot of arguments that there is no connection between violent imagery and people committing violence.
After 30 years of policing, I don’t believe that for a moment. All of our emergency services colleagues — fire, ambulance, paramedics, doctors — we see things that break us. I’ve got some considerable personal and painful professional experience myself. Imagine what it does to children. The idea that that has no effect seems utterly facile to me. So ban it, yes, and 16 seems reasonable to me.”
Around the world governments are grappling with the regulation of new technologies. The Australian law, which comes into effect at the end of this year, followed the assault and murder of Carly Ryan, 15, from Stirling, South Australia. She was groomed on social media then killed by Garry Francis Newman, a 50-year-old paedophile who had pretended to be an 18-year-old musician and convinced her to meet him. France and several American states, including Florida and Texas, have passed laws to restrict social media access for younger teenagers.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, argued recently that children should be protected from social media and said there was a “good chance” Australia was doing a “smart thing”. This week Meta announced that teenagers under 16 would not be able to live stream Instagram content without the approval of their parents, a sign that at least one of the tech giants knows there is an issue. In this country, though, the government recently watered down a private members’ bill that sought to introduce tougher controls on smartphone and social media use by children.
The internet has opened up the world in many wonderful ways, democratising the spread of information and forging positive connections, but it has also created new opportunities for terrorists and criminals to form networks and find targets. Free speech is a foundation stone of democracy, but a basic tenet of civilised society is that children should be protected from violence, abuse and extremism, whether in the real world or online. As Basu put it: “Freedom of speech is not an absolute right, there is no freedom to do harm, never has been, never should be.”
In theory most social media sites have a minimum age of 13 but this is rarely enforced. According to the children’s commissioner’s office, about two thirds of children aged 8 to 12 are on social media. In any case, 13 is too young for much of the material freely available on these platforms. A survey by the Youth Endowment Fund found that 70 per cent of children aged 13 to 17 have encountered some form of violence on social media in the past year.
There was a direct impact on their behaviour, with two thirds of teenagers who had been involved in violence saying social media had played a role in their actions. More than a third of young people reported that seeing weapons-related content on social media had made them more likely to carry a knife.
The ease with which the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana was able to fuel his violent fantasies was a vivid and tragic demonstration of the danger of the torrent of extreme material available online. Three minutes before he left home to murder three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July, he searched X for a video of the Sydney church attack three months earlier in which a bishop was stabbed while livestreaming a sermon.
Nicholas Prosper, who murdered his mother and siblings in Luton last year, had searched online for information about mass shootings and became obsessed by violence. His distinctive yellow and black outfit was intended to give him lasting online notoriety.
Imran Ahmed, the founder of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said the increasingly extreme content being pumped out on social media platforms was driven by the commercial imperative of the tech companies to keep people on their sites for as long as possible. “What they found is that violative content, stuff that violates the norms, gets the most engagement,” he said.
“If you go on TikTok and open an account as a 13-year-old girl, within 2.6 minutes it’s giving you suicide content, within eight minutes it’s giving you eating disorder content. There is such wide-scale evidence now of harm that a failure to act because of nervousness frankly is a disservice and a betrayal of the British people.”
Treat TikTok like cigarettes
Some will say it is too soon to know the impact of platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and X, but when it comes to children the precautionary principle should apply. As with new medicines, the emphasis must be on demonstrating that the innovation is safe rather than that the social experiment is causing harm. Society has imposed rules on the age at which children can drink or smoke or watch violent films, so it is logical to create a “digital watershed” to safeguard children, with robust age verification enforced through a universal digital ID system.
There is a longstanding consensus across the political spectrum that the balance between individual liberty and state control should be different for those under 18. Indeed, JD Vance, the US vice-president, recognised this distinction in a recent speech on AI even as he railed against wider regulations being imposed on American tech companies. “Of course we want to ensure the internet is a safe place, but it is one thing to prevent a predator from preying on a child on the internet and it is something quite different to prevent a grown man or woman from accessing an opinion that the government thinks is misinformation,” he said.
The public is strongly in favour of further protections for teenagers. A YouGov poll for the Times commission found that 66 per cent of people back a ban on social media for under-16s with 24 per cent against. Support is even higher among 16 to 24-year-olds: 74 per cent according to a More in Common survey. The first generation that has grown up with the internet from birth understands the dangers better than anyone. There is now an urgent need to act — not just to protect young people’s mental health and education but also for the sake of public safety and national security.
Rachel Sylvester is chair of The Times Crime and Justice Commission
