'We get sick, Meta get rich': Why the 'guinea pig generation' wants Labour to tax social media giants

Do you remember the first time you logged onto social media? If you’re under 30, chances are you were a teenager – or younger.

Adele Walton was ten when she created her Facebook account. Posting statuses, sending messages, taking pictures: at the time, it all seemed like harmless fun.

Far from it, Walton says. Now an author and journalist, Walton is part of the Mad Youth Organise – a group of young people fighting to take back control from big tech.

“I’m part of the guinea pig generation,” she told Big Issue. “[I] grew up seeing myself and others through the lens of Meta’s platforms.” Meta is the company that owns Instagram and Facebook.

“It isn’t that Meta don’t know that countless others and I are experiencing these harms. It’s that they don’t care.”

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Today (4 February), Mad Youth Organise protested outside Meta’s London headquarters. The campaign – coordinated by patient group Just Treatment – is calling for a tax on big tech and other complicit industries.

Such a levy could raise £5.2bn per year, enough to plug the estimated gap between the present level of care and comprehensive mental health care for all young people.

“We want a social media tax that can help fund the disastrously underfunded health services in the UK,” said Gigi El-Halaby, one of the activists at the protest.

“We get sick and more divided. They get richer and more powerful… We need to tackle their corporate power and tax their revenues to compensate for the harm they cause.”

Children as young as seven or eight regularly log on to the web, according to a recent survey, and 95% of teenagers have access to a smartphone. Meanwhile, identified rates of anxiety and depression in young people have increased by 70% over the past 25 years.

According to Royal Society for Public Health, the vast majority of young people say four of the five most-used social media platforms actually make their feelings of anxiety worse. El-Halaby has experienced this first hand.

“As an already vulnerable teenager [social media] caused my mental health to deteriorate,” they said.

“I was constantly bombarded with unrealistic body standards, which fuelled my anorexia and depression.”

There are 10 million new photographs uploaded to Facebook alone every hour, providing an almost endless potential for young people to be drawn into appearance-based comparisons.

This constant stream of images made El-Halaby feel “constantly inadequate”.

“I also experienced cyberbullying and harassment on apps like Facebook and Instagram for years,” they said.

Walton – recent author of Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World – fears that Meta’s recent decision to end fact-checking will spur a proliferation of dangerous content.

“We can expect to see harmful content that puts young users at risk to skyrocket, and we will suffer the consequences,” she said. “Young people are sick and tired of having to beg Meta to do the bare minimum for its users and keep us safe.”

Politicians, she adds, must act. The tech levy idea builds on an existing Liberal Democrats election pledge to tax social media companies to pay for mental health advocates in schools.

Mad Youth Organise are calling for a suite of other policy changes, including reform to the housing market to save young people the indignity and stress of living in unsafe and unsuitable housing.

Their campaign has some political momentum already, securing backing from Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East.

“The youth mental health crisis is not a mystery. Young people’s lives are getting harder and harder,” she said. “Inequality is rising, living standards and life expectancy are falling; precarity, stress and hardship are everywhere. No wonder one in five young people has a probable mental disorder. 

“The culprits of the youth mental health crisis are clear: years of austerity, combined with unaccountable corporations exploiting young people for profit, facilitated by government policy making that focuses on the demands of businesses but fails to meet the needs of young people.”

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