But People With Hammers, Zoe...

...you just cannot tell them something isn't a nail. They just want to use the hammer.

Kemi Badenoch is evolving into one of those politicians who, whatever she says, is not just likely to be wrong, but is likely to say the opposite of what’s right. She says Greenland is not a big deal (a “second-order issue” is how she described it to the BBC) – it is a big deal. She says net zero is too expensive – the opposite is true: net-anything-but-zero is a cost we can’t afford. But her promise to ban under-16s from using social media, echoing Australia’s recent move, is hard to write off completely; people across the spectrum, including Andy Burnham, agree with it.

Which should, for any functional human with two brain cells to rub together, be a sign that it's not something to endorse. 

Nobody who has ever met a teenager, or read the news, will be completely at ease with the role of social media in young lives. There are horrific effects, which have been well documented and inadequately addressed ever since the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing suicide and self-harm content online.

We are seriously considering this because one obviously mentally unwell teenager died? No, because people like Zoe's colleagues have realised what an invention that allows worldwide instant communication means for their progressive agenda.

Many platforms, even those that seem anodyne, are purpose-built to spur anxiety, self-doubt, self-harm, anything that delivers attention. We have this completely contradictory environment in which a nine-year-old can’t walk to school alone without turning into grist for a radio phone-in about parental neglect, and yet tech companies with a record of generating emotional distress for profit are allowed access to children’s bedrooms.

 And after all, it's not just young people who are using it, is it..?

Between Gen X miscreants and hyper-credulous boomers, there are generations that pose a greater risk to, and are themselves at risk from, the informational ecosystem. Any thinking politician needs to work out how to deal with them.

Shame we don't have any of those.