My Lords, I also support the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. It is relatively easy to stand here and make the case for age verification for porn: it is such a black and white subject and it is disgusting pornography, so of course children should be protected from it. Making the case for the design of the attention economy is more subtle and complex—but it is incredibly important, because it is the attention economy that is driving our children to extreme behaviours.
I know this from my own personal life; I enjoy incredibly lovely online content about wild-water swimming, and I have been taken down a death spiral towards ice swimming and have become a compulsive swimmer in extreme temperatures, partly because of the addiction generated by online algorithms. This is a lovely and heart-warming anecdote to give noble Lords a sense of the impact of algorithms on my own imagination, but my children are prone to much more dangerous experiences. The plasticity of their brains is so much more subtle and malleable; they are, like other children, open to all sorts of addiction, depression, sleeplessness and danger from predators. That is the economy that we are looking at.
I point noble Lords to the intervention from the surgeon general in America, Admiral Vivek Murthy—an incredibly impressive individual whom I came across during the pandemic. His 25-page report on the impact of social media on the young of America is incredibly eye-opening reading. Some 95% of American children have come across social media, and one-third of them see it almost constantly, he says. He attributes to the impact of social media depression, anxiety, compulsive behaviours and sleeplessness, as well as what he calls the severe impact on the neurological development of a generation. He calls for a complete bar on all social media for the under-13s and says that his own children will never get anywhere near a mobile phone until they are 16. That is the state of the attention economy that
the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, talks about, and that is the state of the design of our online applications. It is not the content itself but the way in which it is presented to our children, and it traps their imagination in the kind of destructive content that can lead them into all kinds of harms.
Admiral Murthy calls on legislators to act today—and that was followed on the same day by a commitment from the White House to look into this and table legislation to address the kind of design features that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, is looking at. I think that we should listen to the surgeon general in America and step up to the challenge that he has given to American legislators. I am enormously grateful to my noble friend the Minister for the incredible amount of work that he has already done to try to bridge the gap in this matter, but there is a way to go. Like my noble friend Lady Harding, I hope very much indeed that he will be able to tell us that he has been able to find a way across the gap, or else I shall be supporting the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, in her amendment.