Mm

...

I think that Michael Gove's education reforms had a huge impact on young people's mental health.

And so I said to this BBC researcher, um, "I'd really like to, to talk about what I'm seeing in schools.

Um, young people not having as much opportunity to do sports and arts with a proven therapeutic value.

All of this increased testing and this, um, emphasis on exams, it's, uh, it's having an impact on the teachers and on the students as well." And this researcher said, "Well, the thing is, I can't allow you to say that on air because the government aren't here to defend themselves." And so the way I interpreted that is that the government could just insulate themselves from criticism by not-

Right.

Um, and it's an incredible book.

Yeah.

And I think that there's two things that people don't understand, still don't understand, uh, from the tone of some of the responses I was getting when, when I spoke about it on Instagram.

First is that plagiarism software will pick up if you haven't done an exactly correct citation, for example.

Um, there, there are so many people who have fallen foul of, of plagiarism software, and they haven't directly copied somebody else's work.

But when you, a layman hears plagiarism, they think, oh, they've stolen something from someone else.

And the other thing I think people don't realize is how rife plagiarism is- [laughs]

[laughs]

And I said, "Okay.

What does this mean and how does it damage people to the point where switching off becomes an act of self-protection?

There's a chapter on how the media works, and one of the things that we focus on is how actually whether you're talking about social media or what's now called legacy media, it's all dictated by the attention economy.

Um, and that's because legacy media has i- a, a complete obsession with the content's second life online.

So even now if you have a radio or television show, you're still thinking in these kind of one, two, three-minute viral clips.

A- as you quite rightly say, the audiences of legacy media, the people who read the newspapers is going down, and yet the tone of the discourse is still very much dictated by the newspapers.

'Cause even when people are talking on social media, they very often take their cue from headlines in the newspapers.

And so that kind of shrinks the, the discourse, but it also means that, um, these headlines are competing to be heard, they're, they're making a lot of noise, which is why people are switching off because you can't have measured reasonable headlines in the attention economy.

So what kind of accountability would you like to see imposed on political elites that you currently think is lacking?

What do you think about this social media ban that is allegedly going to come into place next year for under-16s?

It's put me in an awful situation where I never thought I would say this, but I have one point of agreement with Nigel Farage.

Because I think it probably is well-meaning, but I don't think that it will be workable.

So this is what I think is going to happen.

I think...

Young people are going to find ways to get around it.

As we've seen in Australia, depending on which study you read, between 60% and two-thirds of 12 to 16-year-olds in Australia where there has been a ban continue to use social media.

Maybe social media actually isn't a sort of this nirvana that they think it is i think at times because i do think that you know as we know with neuroplasticity and neural pathways i think that now kids are being so conditioned to think that this is just a it's a habituated behavior now and it's becoming as we've said it's an addiction and parents don't really know what to do about it because parents aren't addiction specialists so they watch their kid disappear into their room they don't know whether they're gaming they don't know whether they're looking at porn they don't know whether they're kind of going down all these social media holes they don't know whether it's a girl who's becoming obsessed with her skincare routine and it's how we navigate this stage because as you said that it's these boomer parents who aren't that tech savvy who are like geez we don't know what to do so what advice would you give them I

Um, what have you been up to?

So last week I went to Global Academy, and I did a focus group with five young people aged between sixteen and eighteen there, and the conversation we had completely reflective of the conversations that I'm having.

I'm in about two or three schools and colleges a week all over the UK, and we spoke about online safety.

Um, I began by asking them about whether they would support a ban for under sixteens.

Unsurprisingly, they weren't fans of that idea.

-with technology.

Where they would have once talked to a friend, they're now talking to something that in, in their view won't judge them and won't spread gossip about them.

Those were the main advantages that they identified.