Let parents decide on giving children smartphones, says Snap boss

Evan Spiegel, the founder and chief executive of Snap, the technology company, says that decisions about when to give smartphones to children should be left to their parents rather than governments or schools.
Campaigns are building to stop children having access to the phones and countries around the world are considering age restrictions on social media users.
The Australian government intends to ban social media use by children, potentially up to the age of 16. Peter Kyle, Britain’s science, innovation and technology secretary, said at the weekend that he was looking “very closely” at the move.
British schools are banning smartphones and parents are signing up in their droves to the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign.
Snapchat, Spiegel’s social media platform, is aimed at the younger market and has 850 million monthly active users. Three quarters of these are aged between 13 and 34, but the company says more than 80 per cent are over 18.
The technology entrepreneur has first-hand experience of raising children in the smartphone era, which has informed his thinking. The billionaire married Miranda Kerr, 41, the Australian Victoria’s Secret model, in 2017. The couple have just had their third son. When they got together,Kerr already had Flynn, her eldest son, with Orlando Bloom, the English actor.
Spiegel, 34, said: “Even in our house with four boys, they’re all different and they all have different circumstances. I’m not sure when we’ll give a smartphone to our younger boys, but I do think that parents really know what’s best for their children.
“We’re very focused on just making sure that our kids have a balance in their lives. So Flynn, for example, is almost 14. He’s allowed to use Snapchat, but we also really encourage him to, you know, do after-school activities like sports and hang out with his friends. And I think, trying to develop that, that healthy balance is really important, especially because he spent a lot of his formative years in the pandemic, where he could only talk to his friends on technology. And so I think it’s been maybe a transition period back out into the real world and establishing that, you know, healthy balance and relationship with technology.”
Snap does not like to refer to itself as a social media company. It prefers to call itself a “visual messaging” platform. It falls under the scope of new social media regulations being introduced in Britain and Europe.
The UK’s Online Safety Bill, which comes into force next year, requires social media companies to protect their users from harmful content or face fines up to 10 per cent of their global turnover. Europe has an equivalent law.
Spiegel appears to be relaxed about the changes. “We’ve really architected Snapchat differently to make a positive impact in people’s lives,” he said. “I think those decisions, like moderating content or requiring people to add each other as friends before they start communicating, make it easier to navigate the regulatory environment, because they put users’ wellbeing first.”
He described regulation of the sector as “ inevitable” because “technology has a huge impact in people’s lives and so I think it’s very reasonable that as a society, we develop rules of the road”.
Snap points to research from the University of Amsterdam that using the platform has a “positive impact on wellbeing and friendship closeness but has no significant impact on self-esteem”, unlike the “consistent negative impact on time spent on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube”.
The NSPCC says its investigation into child abuse images on social media shows that Snapchat was involved in 44 per cent of instances where an online platform was identified by police.
Spiegel responded: “We invest really heavily in our trust and safety teams and we’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars, both in the teams, but also the technology to proactively detect abuse of material and remove that content and report it to law enforcement. So we take that responsibility very seriously.”