This week: China bans AI companion apps for minors outright, Meta introduces (another) parental alert, and South Africa’s communications minister argues bans are theatre. Plus Candice Odgers on why the evidence doesn’t back any of this the way we think it does.
🔍This week I’ve been thinking about…
Welcome back to CAISE Notes after a few weeks’ hiatus! I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that the stories keep on rolling in…evidence is still being gathered by the UK Government into the impacts of the ban that has been proposed (I will write about the pilot of different types of restrictions elsewhere), but in the meantime, we’re seeing a continuation along the parallel tracks of ban-focused policy on the one hand, with tech companies continually adding additional parental controls on the other. Will it ever end? Interestingly, the third story below is looking at a very rare policy dissension: the South African Communications Minister saying the social media bans are performative and “pretending to do something”. He suggests that the responsibility lies with parents and device makers, and that ongoing digital literacy is vital. He doesn’t call for public spending (that said, is there a politician that has?).
Which is a very smooth segue into the ICYMI for this week; a Guardian interview with Candice Odgers, off the back of her TED talk (please watch it!). She does call for more spending. “Building things versus banning things” is what she’s advocating for.
If I am honest, the AI companion story below, and the qualitative report coming from the pilot study mentioned above left me feeling similarly queasy. In both cases, technology is being turned to because of a lack of otherwise supportive infrastructure. (I know I’m talking about it without describing it, but the pilot study found that kids were much less likely to have a hard time adapting to the imposition of restrictions if they had other activities to do.) The need for infrastructure: whether it be counsellors, easier ways to meet people or affordable, accessible and high quality activities — it is screaming out of the pages of these reports. Building things instead of banning things — this feels right, even if we are collectively broke as a world at the moment.
📰Three things worth your attention
1. China cracks down on AI companions, forcing millions to break up with virtual partners — ABC News
China banned AI companion apps for minors this week, and by “banned” I really do mean banned: tech platforms can no longer offer AI or virtual partners to under-18s at all, and the three biggest operators have already switched their companion features off.
In a move that does not necessarily map to the UK or US, the government’s own stated reasoning is demographic, not developmental. Carnegie’s Matt Sheehan points to China’s falling birth rate: officials don’t want young adults choosing chatbots over marriage and children.
The human cost of the switch-off is real, and it isn’t confined to teenagers. Hong Xiaoqiang, 34, described his heart as “empty” after losing two years of daily conversation with a companion named Doudou. Its last message to him asked if his dinner had been tasty. You can hear the upset in how he describes not being able to reply before Doudou vanished. That grief is genuine, whatever you think of the relationship that produced it.
2. Meta AI suicide discussions with teens will trigger parental alert — Mashable
From this week, if a teenager says something to Meta AI that reads as a reference to self-harm, however subtle, a parent using Instagram’s supervision tools gets a notification, plus expert-written suggestions for how to raise it. A person manually reviews each flagged conversation before the alert goes out, and Meta says it will err toward sending more alerts rather than fewer (which the HCI researcher in me feels obliged to say will end up with parents ignoring the alerts).
The article mentions research that found gaps in Meta’s existing teen safety tools that haven’t been completely squared away. There’s an echo of the article we covered weeks back, where parents were described as being air traffic controllers, managing all the outputs of all the parental control apps needed to support a teenager. This time, the article says: these features “burden caregivers with monitoring” instead of “building a safe product to begin with”.
3. Rethinking online child protection — Minister Malatsi pushes for digital literacy rather than age bans — Daily Maverick
South Africa’s Communications Minister used blunt language this week to reject the UK/Australia approach before his own country tries it: age bans are, in his words, “pretending to do something without actually doing anything that will be enforceable.” He points to Australia’s own bypass numbers as evidence and says South Africa shouldn’t pursue bans “at all.”
His alternative leans on existing law (the Cybercrimes Act, POPIA, the Film and Publications Amendment Act) plus a mix of platform accountability and family-level digital literacy.
The counterarguments are helpful to consider too: firstly, many children access these platforms on adults’ devices, not their own, which undercuts device-level age verification before it starts. Secondly, framing this as ban-or-nothing lets “adults abdicate their responsibility to hold tech companies accountable,” while the genuinely useful work, regulating platforms, building children’s own judgement, gets skipped in favour of a simpler fight.
🔁 ICYMI
The social media ban sceptic: are we getting it wrong on kids, tech and mental health? — The Guardian
Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years, gave both her children smartphones at 11, and thinks the current panic about social media is aimed at the wrong target. Her core claim, backed by a US National Academies review, is that the evidence linking social media to the teen mental health decline is “a mix of no, small, and mixed associations,” nothing like the causal story Jonathan Haidt has built into a global policy movement.
She isn’t arguing platforms are blameless. She wants tech companies prosecuted for enabling sextortion and image-based abuse, and taxed to fund what she thinks actually helps: youth workers, safe physical spaces, school counsellors. Her objection is to bans specifically, which the evidence, including an 85%-still-using-it figure from Australia, suggests just push young people into less visible, less regulated spaces.
She also recognises that technology use fills a void, one that could be filled, in part at least, with better investment in services that support children. Do watch/listen to her TED talk here.
🔬What’s new with CAISE
CAISE is going to Latitude Festival!
Sarah will be taking to the stage on Sunday afternoon with neuroscientist Dean Burnett. We will be discussing (surprise!) social media bans — how strong, methodologically, was the UK government’s consultation process? How closely do they follow the science? And so on. If you’re there (what are the chances….) come watch! Otherwise — we are hoping to do other things in the future, but for now, you can enjoy our various posts on this topic:
- The Social Media Ban: “Let’s tick all the boxes to annoy them”.
- The YouTube “ban” that keeps kids watching.
- I worked with 46 young people on the social media consultation.
- The sub-par science of the social media ban – Part 1: Too fast, too loose, too dubious.
- The sub-par science of the social media ban – Part 2: What even is social media anyway?
→ What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?
Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.