I wonder how many readers of this blog in the United Kingdom remember the passing of the The Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955? The passing of the law in Australia banning those under 16 from a slew of social media platforms jogged my memory of the campaign in the 1950s to ban ‘horror comics’ from sale in the United Kingdom that led to the passing of the legislation.  

These comics were imported from the USA, and created something of a panic. Interestingly, it was the Communist Party that started the drive to ban such comics, but it wasn’t until the campaign gathered mainstream support from those that would never vote for a communist candidate that the conservative government of the day took notice and action.

See Wikipedia Comics Campaign Council – Wikipedia for more details. I recall the debate about these comics in our household as a primary school pupil at the time, although I never actually saw any of the offending titles. This was, perhaps, my first awareness of the power of mass movements.

At the same time as that debate bout harmful publications this side of the Atlantic, there was discussion about the consequences of free local telephone calls in the USA. These were provided by the Bell Telephone Company. Films of the time showed teenage girls, and it always seems to be girls, coming home and spending all their free time on the phone to friends they had just left at the high school gate.

For landline phone or the 1950s, read mobile phones of the 2020s.

The Bishop of Blackburn in his ‘Thought for the day’ on BBC Radio 4 this morning made the interesting point that perhaps the cuts to youth services and the decline in alternative activities in a society, where adults don’t have time to volunteer in the way that they used to do, might have left young people with fewer opportunities, so that interacting with a phone or screen has replaced the comment that ‘he always has his nose in a book’.

I think that the bishop has a point. The problem with the Australian move is twofold. Firstly, it doesn’t offer anything in the place of the banned activity, and secondly, and more worrying for the governing party in Australia, is whether there will there be any long-term consequences when the generation banned from social media become voters. We won’t know for a few years yet, but how long will the ban linger in memories? Of course, much depends upon what happens over the next few months.

I trust young people, but my instinct is that just banning something without wondering what will happen is not a smart political move. Anyway, can young people, better versed in the technology of the future than their elders, just use VPNs or similar to avoid the ban completely?

For most of history, governments have regulated or banned certain activities. It is only in the past half century that freedom rather than censorship has been the watchword. Is the pendulum of public opinion, and hence government action, now starting to swing in the other direction?