Name: Bans on social media and phones: what's the evidence? - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2025-12-02T15:20:47.000Z
Duration: 19 min 49 s
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Welcome to this episode of what in the World from the BBC World Service.

Present continuous

Like, I keep on grabbing mine to check for notifications and messages.

It feels like if I were to leave my phone at home for even just a few hours, there's this, like, sense of dread in the pit of my stomach.

And as long as there have been smartphones, we have been talking about whether children should have them, should they be allowed in schools, what kind of age limits should there on social media?

But what evidence is there that smartphones are actually bad for us?

Here to talk us through it is Hayley Clark, BBC journalist.

Right, so I thought if we're going to be talking about teenagers and their phones and we're going to be talking about schools and whether they should be banned, we have to be really honest as well, because I don't know about you, but, like, every week my phone tries to tell me my screen time and quickly flick it away in, like, fear and shame.

And if you go to your screen time, there should be a little purple egg timer.

We're gonna have a look and then show each other.

It's four hours and 14 minutes every day.

Four hours and 14 minutes of time spent or wasted on this.

I'm really surprised about this because I've set time limits on most my apps, like Instagram.

After being on it for, like, 15, 20 minutes a day, it tells me you have reached your time limit.

It says you're going into sleep mode, and

then I just again, flick it away and just turn it down.

Maybe my phone just doesn't want to show me.

It knows I'm not ready for this information.

I think there's been a malfunction because mine says three hours, 29, but that is definitely lower.

It's usually like tipping towards 5, I would say.

Yeah, mine are the same with some embarrassing ones thrown in like ebay and Amazon.

So the notifications, the distractions, I'll go on it for like actually useful purposes.

Maybe Internet banking, maybe to read something on the news, maybe to reply to a message I actually need to see and I just cannot resist.

Then the other notifications and the dopamine hit that comes from, from scrolling.

I can't have like an unread notification.

I have to make sure that all of notifications are checked and then there's like a kind of constant element of doing that to just make sure that like all my ground is covered, that I've got a clean slate so that I can think about other things.

So it's hard to get sort of a consistent account around the world.

But some statistics say that adults like over 18s are using their phones for almost 5 hours a day.

And actually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated screen time, like screen time overall for 11 to 14 year olds as nine hours a day and seven and a half hours.

Okay, that actually, that makes me feel a bit better about my.

But we didn't add in our computer and TV time and all of that.

And also nearly half of teens self report that they use the Internet almost constantly.

So it does seem like the data is showing that phone use and screen time is just consistently rising.

So it kind of makes sense, right, that some countries are now talking about bans or restrictions or limits on phones and social media use, which are the main countries that are talking about it.

So in 2023, a UN report recommended that smartphones should be banned in schools.

They said to red classroom disruption and protect kids from online bullying.

And there's lots of different countries trialing lots of different things.

So in France there is a trial happening called a digital pause where over 200 schools are asking teenagers to hand in their phones at reception.

Here in the uk it is a big topic, it's a big debate and the government's looking at legislation to potentially ban under sixteens from social media.

And in the US it kind of varies state by state, but

in Florida, a bill has passed to ban social media for under 14s and that's going to come into force in January 2025.

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Bans on social media and phones: what's the evidence? - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service

ultimately

anxiety

episode

mental