Children could face two-hour limits on social media like TikTok and Snapchat as part of a government plan to crack down on “compulsive” phone use, the science and technology secretary has said.
Peter Kyle, who is due to make an announcement in the autumn, warned of the effects on young people’s sleep and their ability to focus on studying for exams, saying he was concerned about “the overall amount of time kids spend on these apps” as well as their content.
Among the ideas being seriously considered are a two-hour cap per platform, while a night-time or school-time curfew has also been discussed, according to reports. Last year Australia passed a law to ban all under 16s from social media, although the UK is not expected to go that far.
It comes as a new survey showed one in five children spend at least seven hours a day using phones and tablets.
Mr Kyle said he was “looking very carefully about the overall time kids spend on these apps”.
“I think some parents feel a bit disempowered about how to actually make their kids healthier online,” he told Sky News.
“I think some kids feel that sometimes there is so much compulsive behaviour with interaction with the apps they need some help just to take control of their online lives and those are things I’m looking at really carefully.
“We talk a lot about a healthy childhood offline. We need to do the same online. I think sleep is very important, to be able to focus on studying is very important,” he added.
He added that he wanted to stop children spending hours viewing content which “isn’t criminal, but it’s unhealthy, the overuse of some of these apps”.
“I think we can incentivise the companies and we can set a slightly different threshold that will just tip the balance in favour of parents not always being the ones who are just ripping phones out of the kids’ hands and having a really awkward, difficult conversation around it,” he added.
It comes after Angela Rayner warned on Tuesday that time spent online is a major factor in the weakening social cohesion in the UK, along with deprivation and immigration.
Warning that the UK faces a repeat of last year’s summer riots unless “the government shows it can address people’s concerns”, the deputy prime minister said that the issue was having a “profound impact on society”.
She told colleagues: “Economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions was having a profound impact on society.”
TikTok and Snapchat have been approached for comment.
