Users by Beeban Kidron — how to make Big Tech behave better

The arrival of Beeban Kidron’s book, Users comes on the heels of Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement to ban social media for the under-16s, echoing measures in Australia that took effect in December. France, Austria and Spain are among other countries planning similar restrictions.

With an endorsement on the front cover from the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation, who has inspired a global debate on smartphones rewiring children’s brains and links to poor mental health, shows Users catching the zeitgeist.

That is, however, a disservice, akin to describing a pop star toiling for years in grimy pubs as an overnight sensation. Baroness Kidron has been campaigning for tech safety, regulation and children’s rights for over a decade. In her book, she describes the move from a successful career directing films, including Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

Kidron sees bans as the best solution for the moment. Rather than curb children’s excesses, she urges readers and governments to see such steps as constraints on tech companies. Restrictions are a temporary balm not a cure. The effort should go on making tech behave better through a wide range of measures. These include blacklisting or geoblocking with automatic fines, companies that breach local rules, and designing tech products and services with safety, privacy and autonomy as default.

The trigger for Kidron’s switch to campaigning was watching teens use their smartphones in her documentary, InRealLife, released in 2013. She writes of filming three girls at home, dressing up, taking selfies, before playing on Chatroulette — a website that would connect users across the internet. “I watched as the girls giggled and squealed, flicking through faces and bodies around the world . . . Most were adult men . . . many were masturbating.”

Kidron is not anti-tech, and acknowledges the ‘online world has enabled new forms of self-expression and visibility’

Kidron is not anti-tech, and acknowledges the ‘online world has enabled new forms of self-expression and visibility’

As a director, she was subject to greater oversight than the tech the girls were using. The experiences led her to set up a charity, 5Rights, in 2012, when she was also appointed to the House of Lords as a crossbench peer, helping to push through legislation to raise the age of online maturity from 13 to 18, among other measures. In this work she has encountered parents who have lost their children to suicide after being cyberbullied, depressed by horrific images or encouraged by AI chatbots.

The fury at tech’s argument for its exceptionalism steams from the page. After the British schoolgirl Molly Russell died by suicide in 2017 the coroner concluded Pinterest and Meta “contributed in a ‘more than minimal way’ by serving her streams of self-harm content,” writes Kidron. “If any other (non-tech) company — a hotel chain, a bus operator, a toy manufacturer — had produced a product linked to a child’s death it would have been recalled immediately.”

Kidron says that the way that tech executives could spring into action if they had to — such as cracking down on conspiracy theories about Covid — shows that they could be “global public-health allies” rather than, as they claim, the “mere conduits” of information.

She is angry at the UK for courting the US tech companies rather than standing up to them when their algorithms pump toxic content at users or misuse personal data. She praises South Korea and Switzerland’s decisions to build their own large language models (LLMs), the seedbeds of AI, rather than allowing AI companies to plagiarise creators’ content. Throughout the book, she shows the way that tech companies lobby and the revolving door between tech, regulators and politics.

Facebook’s partnership with the charity Samaritans in 2014, launching a wellbeing campaign, provides “moral cover”, she claims. One common tactic deployed in meetings between governments and tech lobbyists is a request for detailed discussions to be “taken offline”, which in effect becomes a way to bury public accountability.

I have to confess to feeling weary approaching the book after weeks of hearing and reading impassioned arguments for cracking down on children’s smartphone use. Many experts point to weak longitudinal evidence establishing a link between teens’ poor mental health and social media, underscoring greater contributing factors, including parenting, patchy mental health services, as well as school pressures. Introducing bans could let governments off the hook from other efforts like investing in youth services — and remove any incentive for tech companies to improve.

Yet Kidron’s main focus is identifying Big Tech’s harms and arguing it should be treated like other sectors, subject to regulation and pushed to design safer products. She is not anti-tech, acknowledging the “online world has enabled new forms of self-expression and visibility”.

At times, the author is prone to grandiose sweeping statements. “If we act unequivocally to protect children, we will have the tools to protect everything else; but if we fail, we will lose democracy itself.” Vilified on social media, bullied by anonymous emailers, with friends dismissing her for not understanding the “new rock and roll”, she would be forgiven for seizing the moment.

Ultimately, her message is simple: cracking down on tech’s harms will enable us to enjoy its benefits. Kidron implores readers and policymakers to push back against social media and artificial intelligence groups. “When a company claims it cannot do something that would threaten its business model, the obstacle is rarely technical.” She urges us to stop believing them.

Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back by Beeban Kidron WH Allen £22, 416 pages

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