Kemi Badenoch has launched a furious tirade on leading tech companies “using child data to make money” as she doubles down on her plans to ban social media for under 16s.
Speaking to GB News, the Conservative leader declared that the Government must “stop faffing about and making excuses” and impose the ban to protect the nation’s young and vulnerable.
Making clear her own concerns as a mother, Mrs Badenoch told the People’s Channel: “We believe freedom is for adults, and we need to protect children.
“Looking after children requires being firm and putting rules in place. I do not believe in libertarianism for children and allowing them to do whatever they want.
“I’m a mum of three kids, I do what is right for my children. You can call it authoritarian, I tell them when they need to go to bed, I tell them what they need to eat, I tell them what they need to do. But social media has become impossible for parents to police.”
Outlining the importance of her policy, the Tory leader said: “It is not right to ask parents to go toe to toe with tech companies that are so big some of them earn more than countries, that is not right.
“Government needs to get involved, and that is why we are coming up with a policy to limit social media to those who are 16 and over, when they are old enough to be able to start learning how to deal with it, not for leaving little kids to look at content that very sadly, in the case of the bereaved parents who are on the panel with me, led to the death of their children.
“Children are dying. It is right that we do something rather than say it’s a bit authoritarian, let’s not do anything that’s wrong.”
Challenging Mrs Badenoch’s ban, host Tom Harwood questioned whether it is a better idea to “let them learn how it works now rather than suddenly at 16, getting there and not understanding what it is”.
Kemi Badenoch has hit out at tech companies for ‘using children’s data to make money’ as she calls for social media ban
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Mrs Badenoch disagreed, explaining: “If people are going to learn how it works, let them learn at 16, not learn when they’re eight or nine or 10 or 11.
“I sat on a panel with the parents of 12-year-olds who killed themselves because they saw something on TikTok. One of them was being blackmailed. What are they learning?
“This stuff was just content that was being pushed. Social media allows strangers to connect with children – if you were out in the park and you saw strangers talking to a kid, you would get involved.
“And yes, we can stop children from having those devices, but after a certain age, they do need to have those devices.
“My kid walks to school, many children walk to school, they need to be able to contact. Let’s get them off social media, make the devices safer. It is not a perfect solution because perfect solutions don’t exist.”
Pushing back on Mrs Badenoch’s remarks again, Tom questioned the overall data relating to social media and young people losing their lives.
The Conservative leader was joined at her press conference today by families whose children have died in social media related incidents
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The Tory leader hit back: “It’s not just children killing themselves because of social media, it is children killing other children.
“I sat with parents who told me about attacks that killed their son, planned on social media. They groomed other children, recruited other children through social media.
“I don’t want to see this happening more and more because we said we didn’t have enough data, we wanted to see more children being killed before we made a decision, that’s not right.
“And quite frankly, if there was any other item that was killing children, we wouldn’t say, well, let’s see how many more kids get killed before banning it.”
As Tom expressed concern for the restrictions a ban could pose on adults, including access to “YouTube, WhatsApp and Wikipedia”, Mrs Badenoch made clear that the ban will be solely placed on platforms which “allow strangers to connect to children”.
She told GB News: “Adults should have freedom, not children. We have to stop faffing about and messing around and making excuses for not doing the right thing because someone, somewhere wants to look at porn.
Mrs Badenoch told GB News that ‘somebody has to stand up for the children’
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“Sorry, but no, somebody needs to be the grown up in the room, I’m being the grown up. I am not a libertarian, I am a Conservative.
“I care about family, I care about kids, not just mine, but your viewers’s children and their grandchildren. Someone needs to say something.”
Taking aim at the tech companies in charge of social media platforms, the Tory leader fumed: “The whole world is moving on, okay? This pretence that the tech media companies, these companies run by people who don’t let their kids on social media, they don’t let their children on social media, but they think your children should go on it. You think that’s right?
“Why is it that the people who run the tech companies say no for themselves, but yes for your children – because they’re using your children’s data to make money, and I’m a politician who is standing up for those kids, somebody has to.”