Anyone seeking a heartwarming Christmas story might find it in the arc of Esther Ghey’s life – from self-hating teenage single mother with a serious drug addiction to earning a university degree and a well-paid career. That was until February 2023, when her 16-year-old daughter Brianna was murdered by two 15-year-old schoolchildren.
Although her killers were partly motivated by the fact that Brianna was transgender, transitioning had been one of the easiest parts of her child’s life, according to Esther. It was the smartphone Brianna was given on starting high school that triggered her devastating trajectory. A child desperate for attention in the digital world but terrified of the real world was lost in an online realm. Her online role model was a girl who was denying herself food. Esther’s descriptions of Brianna’s violent addiction to her phone and the mother’s desperate attempts to confiscate it will haunt the reader long after they close her book, Under a Pink Sky: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss and the Power of Forgiveness.
In the week since Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s took effect, the airwaves have thrummed with the chorus of young teenage protesters on the one hand – child entrepreneurs and children who felt the odd one out in school and found their tribe in tech – and a second group of resigned adult voices saying the young will find a way around it, because that’s what the young do. A third group argued that more could be done to force the big tech platforms into line rather than an outright ban. A fourth just wants the ban here, right now.
Jess Kelly, Newstalk’s technology correspondent, says that after seven years in the job the most common word she hears from parents is “powerless”. But Kelly, now 36, belongs to the third group because at one time she was also in the first; one of those who found their tribe in tech, building communities, friendships, skill sets and an eventual career in tech.
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Yet for many there is no in-between. The fact is that social media companies have created phone addiction as a business model. They devour childhood. Scientists note that the brain is going through a highly sensitive period between the ages of 10 and 19, when identities and feelings of self-worth are forming and “frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain”, potentially affecting such functions as emotional learning and behaviour, impulse control and emotional regulation.
Irish 15- and 16-year-olds themselves report the fourth-highest level of concern about their social media use out of peers in 37 European countries, according to the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD).
An internal TikTok report uncovered by author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt contained an admission that compulsive usage “correlates with a slew of negative mental effects”, including – according to one lawsuit against the company – “loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy” and “increased anxiety”.
We have over-protected our children in the real world and under-protected them online, says Haidt.
Last week, Anika Wells, Australia’s minister for communications, responded to sceptics in defiant mode. The platforms had had 15 to 20 years to do this of their volition, she said, and – in a particularly sticky soundbite – added: “You can’t out-parent an algorithm.”
Kelly reckons the solution lies somewhere short of an outright ban but – here’s the rub – that way lies rigorous, consistent, hands-on parenting. Parental controls on devices, having “phone up” Fridays (everyone’s phones up on the table where everyone’s apps are pored over, including the adults’) and no phone in the bedrooms under any circumstances. She controls her own nieces’ and nephews’ devices, which allows her to turn off certain apps and see when they’re using them and where. She wants children to be taught resilience, how to screenshot, block and report, and how to call someone out who is being abusive. If you can’t put that time in, don’t give them a device.
In a 2024 interview, Haidt hoped that, soon enough, no mother would have to hear her child say “I’m the only one” without a phone. People say phones are here to stay, he said, but so are cars – and we don’t let 11-year-olds drive them.
He, like most of the world, is up against Silicon Valley’s most elite lobbyists who operate at the heart of Donald Trump’s gilded White House while prattling about Europe’s “civilisational erasure”. The US administration’s repeated pressure on the EU to roll back its Digital Services Act (DSA) as part of continuing trade negotiations is the exemplar of its values. US negotiators recently slapped it on the table again as an exchange for scrapping tariffs on steel and aluminium.
Legitimate comparisons can be drawn between the Silicon Valley/White House edgelords and the decades-long concealment by tobacco industry executives of catastrophic harms caused by their products. The latter knew by the mid-1950s that smoking killed. Few suffered any consequences. But as Bruce Daisley, a former top Twitter executive, noted last week, during the Christchurch mass shootings in New Zealand in March 2019, when the horrific content was being persistently re-uploaded to social media, the Australian government stepped in and said it would hold local executives legally and criminally responsible if that content was not removed – “and let me tell you nothing mobilises an organisation more quickly than realising a local boss is going to prison”, said Daisley in a BBC interview.
As for Esther Ghey, she meets Emma, the mother of her daughter’s killer almost every week. Ghey knows what it was like trying to monitor Brianna’s phone use. Emma, she said, is just a normal woman who was doing her best. Those women are owed something more than a shrug.
Esther Ghey: Under a Pink Sky: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss and the Power of Forgiveness.
