In this episode of Grayling Vantage Point podcast, we explore one of the most pressing and complex issues facing Britain today: online safety and the impact of smartphones and social media on younger generations — particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

Host Tanya Joseph is joined by Anna McShane, Director and Founder of The New Britain Project, and Neil Kleiner, Managing Director of social-first agency movement, to unpack new research findings, shifting public attitudes, and the evolving responsibilities of governments, brands, and parents alike.

Together, they discuss:

– Key insights from the New Britain Project’s latest report on online safety

– How brands are adapting to ethical and empowering content creation

– The role of regulation vs. personal and parental responsibility.

Whether you’re a policymaker, parent, educator, marketer, or simply someone navigating the digital age, this conversation offers valuable insights on shaping a safer, healthier online world.

🔗 Access the full report here: ⁠https://www.newbritain.org.uk/social-media⁠

🎧 Listen and subscribe for more expert perspectives.

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Tanya Joseph: Hello, and welcome to the latest Grayling Vantage Point podcast. Today we’re discussing one of the most debated and pressing issues facing Britain, the role and impact of social media and smartphones, with a particular focus on Gen Z and Gen Alpha. To help me explore this important topic, I’m delighted to be joined by Anna McShane, director and founder of the Think Tank, the New Britain Project and Neil Kleiner, the Managing Director of movement, a social first creative agency. Thank you for joining me and welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:30] Neil Kleiner: Thank you.

[00:00:31] Tanya Joseph: Anna, you’ve just published some research. Can we begin with what came out of that research on public attitudes towards social media, smartphones, and online safety?

And maybe can you summariSe the key findings for Lessness? Mm-hmm.

[00:00:49] Anna McShane: Yeah. So we did a really huge amount of polling and qualitative focus groups as well. It was supported by the National Education Union and we did it with [00:01:00] our polling partners, More in Common. the overwhelming message here is that this is a universal worry.

So we found that seven 2% of Britain’s thought that social media was harming children. That was even greater for, for parents. And in fact. Parents ranked social media as the biggest harm to children’s mental health, and that was above things like bullying or alcohol or smoking. Um, and in terms of the solutions that they wanted to see, they thought that banning social media for under sixteens and banning schools would be more effective than having more counselors in schools, having more provision for child adolescent mental health. Even having more activities for young people. In terms of a polling slam dunk, you can’t really get much greater than that. One of the quotes that was really illustrative from the focus groups that we ran, and we did these up and down the country in communities getting their real lived experience, was that we don’t give 13 year cigarettes [00:02:00] or alcohol. So why are we giving them social media? And I think the second point that really came out was that parents feel powerless. This is a classic collective action problem, and in focus groups time and time again, parents felt that they were, you know, doing the right thing.

They were putting all the rules in place. They were trying to keep their children safe, but they just felt like the battlefield was everywhere and they couldn’t do enough on their own. And that’s why they really wanted government control. And with our poll that we did with Gen Z, (16 to 27 age group) 84% of them said that they’d got around parental controls when they were younger. Doing things like having a second smartphone, having a second social media account using it at night when it wasn’t looked at so much. This really is an issue. We did three polls. One was [00:03:00] nat rep, one was with parents, and one was with Gen Z. And I think the Gen Z one was the most impactful. This is the very generation that grew up with social media, and 62% of those thought that social media did more harm than good.

55% of them thought that life would be better if social media was banned, which I found quite startling, and half of Gen Z, wish they spent less time on it when they were growing up. And I think the most striking finding was that 78% would delay their own children access to social media in the future.

They say it’s become more toxic, more addictive, more unsafe over the last five years. The call for action is really loud and it’s united and it crosses generations, it crosses classes and it crosses voting intentions. So, 86% of parents support raising this digital age of consent to 16 support a national ban in schools.

This isn’t a fringe issue. This is a mainstream concern. It’s also important to say [00:04:00] that some of the conversations I had leading up to this with it, there was a worry that perhaps this was parents projecting their own anxieties over their own smartphone use. But when you’ve got Gen Z sort of sounding the alarm as well, we’ve got to sit up and listen.

[00:04:15] Tanya Joseph: Neil, as a professional working in this space every single day, does the report reflect your experience and are there findings that came as surprise to you?

[00:04:25] Neil Kleiner: The findings really hit home, especially the notion of the scale of regret.

Um, I think that was a really incredibly impactful statistic and quote, half of Gen Z said they wish they’d spend less time on their phones growing up. And that’s not data, that’s an emotional truth. Sometimes we can be blinded by the numbers, but that sense of emotional regret, is really powerful.

t’s a generation reflecting on their own childhood and saying, we want better for the next one.

[00:05:00] Equally, I have to say that social media is a really, hugely confusing place that’s changing all the time. And for every instance of a child who is perhaps bullied because of their gender identity, I know there are hundreds more who have found their community through social media and found support and found a sense of belonging with it as well. I completely agree  that we need more regulation, but I think there’s also such incredibly important elements of social media that  actually create communities and help people as well.

It’s, but it’s that balance that we need to readdress through, through training, through education and through cultural, um, a cultural attitude shift, I guess, to what social media really is and what it’s for.

[00:05:55] Tanya Joseph: So Anna, what’s the response been? I mean, [00:06:00] in the report itself, there’s quite a lot of recommendations, policy recommendations. What has the reaction been, and particularly from policy makers and from government?

[00:06:08] Anna McShane: We did this polling in the lead up to a private member’s bill that was brought by an MP called Josh McAllister, and he was calling for many of the recommendations that we had in the report, around a ban in schools and a ban for under sixteens. That motion did not pass. If it had happened maybe two weeks later, like the day after Adolescences had come out, I think we might have been in a different position. In terms of the reaction from government, there is a big cohort of back bench labor MPs who are really agitated by this and want to work together to get this moved on.

In terms of government, I think they’re in a really tricky position. because you’ve got Trump and tariffs, and this isn’t just a conversation about Britain, actually. You can’t really intertwine it from the [00:07:00] conversations around digital tax and so on. Chris Bryant, when he closed, he’s the minister that sort sits between Defence and culture. When he closed the private members bill, he said that inaction is not an option. So I am hopeful that that government are going to do something and move on this, they had the children’s code just announced last week that came out properly for the online safety bill. That’s an important first step.

But it’s quite clear from the polling that parents and the public want to see much further measures on this. I’s all to play for really, but our poll was referenced by Gareth Southgate in that seminal speech that he did. It’s certainly moved the national conversation, but I think probably one of the bigger barriers, and one that we’re hoping to look at in the coming months, is the how. Looking across the world about other countries and how it’s working there. Australia are just putting in theirs. They’re having, [00:08:00] some success, but they’re running into challenges as well. So I think learning from that will be really important to make it feel more doable for government.

[00:08:08] Tanya Joseph: And of course that’s where we are now, but the rapid pace of all of what’s going on, on social, on digital platforms, it would be worth us thinking a bit about how’s that’s going to evolve over the coming period. Neil, from your experience, what do you think are the key trends that we need to be aware of?

Over the longer term.

[00:08:31] Neil Kleiner: Yeah, I mean, I started working, um, in social media and marketing in the days of MySpace. I know I don’t look at obviously, um, but the gray hair I think has come from the, the exhaustion of trying to keep up with the pace of change. Um, I think when social media first emerged, what was so interesting about it was the connections were based on, on, uh, passion projects. MySpace was about connecting through music. Twitter [00:09:00] initially was about connecting to what’s going on in the world right now. LinkedIn obviously, about career development. But then we’ve seen the evolution of social platforms towards this great town square where everyone can communicate and be heard.

initially that was a lovely utopian idea. As an old punk rocker, I love that notion that anyone that had an intellectual thought could convey that to the world, and be heard, or anyone who had an element of creativity, whether art, a painting or, or music or loving food, whatever could express that to the world.

I think what we’ve seen is this evolution of social media moving away from conversation towards consumption. TikTok has certainly ushered that evolution. We’re far more passive in terms of how we’re engaging with that content, taking in [00:10:00] information rather than Talking about what that information means. It means that in 2025, for the first time ever, social media usage is stagnant. In the UK, it’s not that hockey stick that it has been. We’re seeing obviously some platforms like TikTok’s continuous meteoric rise, we’re seeing a bit of stagnation and also we’re seeing how we use those platforms change to the public conversation towards private messaging platforms or private messaging parts of social platforms. Instagram is yes, a way to share photography and video, but it’s also, a private messaging platform and that’s how a lot of children use it. Snapchat. Equally, it’s not just about funny filters, it’s also a way that certainly my children communicate with all their girlfriends.

We’re moving to this space of private discourse with smaller groups, and that is because people [00:11:00] don’t want the pressure of that public discourse. They want to be in a place where they feel more secure, where they are with their trusted group. The biggest social network in the UK currently, according to research this year, is WhatsApp.

And when you think WhatsApp, it’s just text messaging. But actually WhatsApp is perhaps the most classically, social media platform in the world that we have today. It’s people connecting in groups, whether it’s your street, your WhatsApp group, which some of us probably have or friendship groups, and that’s where conversations are happening, in private.

Whereas platforms like TikTok and Instagram are far more about consumption. So on the positive side, I think we’ll see the need for more creative literacy. I think we’ll see the need for more creative expression, but I think we’ll also have to find a way to regulate and guide those private conversations to make [00:12:00] sure that they are safe, and that the discourse there is actually doing good and not harm.

So it is interesting that we’re moving away towards private conversations because people feel perhaps more safe there, but equally that means it’s harder to regulate. It’s harder to understand who’s saying what and to whom.

[00:12:20] Tanya Joseph: Yeah. And Anna, do you think that move towards more private conversations and greater awareness of acknowledgement, at least on the part of parents, about some of the dangers of this space and actually the acknowledgement of of, of, of that generation that’s been most affected?

Do you think that’s gonna change behaviour? Are people ging to say, actually, I’m not going to, I’m not going to allow this to dominate my life as much. Or is it a drug, a habit that we can’t kick.

[00:12:50] Anna McShane: So it’s interesting. First of all, Gen Z think that their parents are more addicted than they are.

There’s definitely, a space for real national conversation about all of our use and consumption of social media. There is a trend within Gen Z at the moment to detoxify a bit from digital. You’re seeing final sales really expand. In the future we’ll see things like newspapers being more bought in paper format and moving away from doing everything online to actually real life interactions.

It’s important to understand that this starts really young. And so actually the conversation shouldn’t just be about whether we ban it for under sixteens and whether it’s appropriate in secondary schools. We also need to be having that conversation with parents quite early on about giving access to really, very, very young children to devices that are quite constant and are addictive. Don’t have that conversation [00:14:00] until the transition into secondary school, when you buy them their first proper smartphone. But if you’re not having that conversation about just consumption of screen time, then I think we, we’ve kind of already lost the battle a bit.

So I think it does need to start a lot earlier. I heard an interesting finding earlier this week. I went to meet the meet the writer, Jack Thorn, of  Adolescence. To continue to see what we can be doing in this space to push the agenda forward. And he was saying that in universities now, people, academics and teachers, are saying that young people are coming through and they’re basically incapable of finishing a whole book and reading a whole book. That’s an interesting conversation for us as a country around productivity and economic growth as well. There’s much more to it than just children, but I think starting with children is probably the best place to move us forward.

[00:14:51] Tanya Joseph: Yeah. I saw a stat yesterday that fewer than half school-aged children read on their own read books on their own. And that’s just really startling and worrying, not just because of the absence of joy from their lives that books can bring, but also that ability to focus and to do something on your own and have it in your own head is, for me, deeply worrying.

Neil, it begs the question really about what brands and organisations are doing, and are they, increasingly aware or not of how you should be creating content, which is a bit more ethical and a bit more empowering. And less damaging really.

[00:15:37] Neil Kleiner: Yeah. It’s a mixed bag. I mean, there’s the classics of Dove and their self-esteem project, which is wider than social media, but social media is certainly where it plays out.

Vodafone’s digital parenting initiative is also really interesting. Lego, are really interesting in terms of how they’re balancing playing tech and creativity altogether. And that’s a really interesting blueprint to follow. [00:16:00] I think where we are getting more briefs from, and having interesting conversations with clients is the nature of not just articulating the value of the products and services that a company sells, but also then balancing that with the values of the organisation.

I think that to me is the blueprint for social media marketing in 2025. It’s not just about, selling. It’s an opportunity for brands and organisations to show up and act, and to show through action, through positive discourse around their products and services, what they can do for the world, what they can do for their customers, and what they can do for communities.

Coty is a really interesting organisation as well, doing a lot for redefining what beauty is. In 2025 as well. A previous agency, I worked with them in terms of the Rimmel “Get the London look”, which back then was Kate Moss.

To the earlier point about representation and people feeling belonging through social media. I think that was a really interesting brief from us to understand. Kate Moss is not what London is. If you look at London, it is LGBT community. It’s Bangladeshi, it’s Jews, it’s Muslims, it’s, it’s a wider spectrum of cultures, races, religions, and skin tones.

And so the London look has evolved. Into reflection of what we should see out of the window and our lived experience as marketers, versus something which is perhaps more idealistic.

[00:17:39] Tanya Joseph: And what about the platforms? Do you think that they are feeling the pressure?

[00:17:46] Neil Kleiner: I’m sure they are. They’re all doing stuff.

They’re all doing stuff right. You know, there are parental features, there are campaigns, unfortunately what’s happening with the US is emboldening these platforms that. Despite the economic car crash of the evolution of Twitter to X.

The major platforms themselves are sitting there going, well, we can really get rid of our monitoring and our safety protocols. We can reduce the need to elicit protection for our users. We don’t need to do that anymore.

And we’ve seen, of course, throughout, the major platforms, most of which their leadership was at the Trump inauguration, which I thought was pretty indicative of where these platforms are going. It’s performative at best. We need to put more pressure on them.

And make sure that those regulatory groups that they have put in place actually have teeth and actually can elicit change rather than just being, you know, an initiative that’s about presenteeism or on a board report. We’re doing all we can. Yeah. Voluntary change is really rarely good enough.

We have to make them work harder for this and work harder for the users and work harder for these generations.

[00:19:32] Tanya Joseph: And then thinking about those users and these generations, Anna, are you seeing a shift in attitude between Gen Z and Gen Alpha?

[00:19:42] Anna McShane: I mean, the thing with Gen Alpha is, is they are children.

They are under 16. And it’s our responsibility as adults to, yes, listen to how they’re using it. In the focus groups we did with those under 16, you know, a lot of them do use it for kind of self-improvement [00:20:00] and that community and belonging.

But I think ultimately, when you ask them why, why they have a phone and engage in this, it’s really fear of missing out. It’s ’cause everybody else does it. And I do think, you know, as adults. In the room. We really need to be conscious of what we’re doing and what we’re saying and what action we can take.

We’re gonna be sleepwalking otherwise, into quite a horrendous situation.

[00:20:30] Tanya Joseph: So what do we as parents do? I mean, we’ve talked a bit about government responsibility and the need to regulate and what platforms could. And should do as opposed to what they are doing.

But what about parents? What, what role do parents have in all of this, do you think?

[00:20:47] Anna McShane: Yeah, so to go back to one of the main findings, this is a collective action problem. So I don’t think it is something that parents can do on their own, just on their own. I had one story from a mum  [00:21:00] in one of the groups where she was sleeping with her child’s phone under her pillow. Because that was the only way she could keep her child from accessing it overnight. But in terms of parents I think the biggest thing is start these conversations early with your child and start thinking about this before you get to the point where you’re having to take it away and have all those arguments.

I think the second thing is that because it’s a collective action problem and no parent can do it all on their own, it’s having conversations with other parents in your school and with your school to kind of come together. So groups like Smartphone Free Childhood are doing an incredible job of really like building.

Building those, those coalitions. Um, and then I think it’s about, you know, just having that, that fight almost and saying, we just don’t have phones in rooms on your own. Mm-hmm. That’s it. I mean, that, that’s the biggest thing I think a, a parent can do to, to keep their child safe. If they have to give them a phone that they just don’t have it in their room, on their own, um, you know, every, every family will have different kind of.

I guess [00:22:00] comfortableness with how much screen time there is, but I think that needs to be the sort of shared thing. That’s where kind of guidance from public health professionals will become more important so that parents feel like they understand it and are emboldened to take those, take those actions.

And we also have the curriculum review happening in, in education at the moment. I think that will have to be an important part of that. It’s not really, it’s sort of sporadically talked about in schools, but I think it’s gonna increasingly become something that’s really important.

[00:22:30] Tanya Joseph: Yeah. We managed until she was 16 and we had lockdown. We went to no phones in bedrooms. But then they started teaching them at home. And that was really hard then. And then it became, well there’s no way we can do it now.

[00:22:47] Neil Kleiner: As a father to two teenage boys, it sucks for them that their dad works in social media.

Like it sucks because [00:23:00] I am probably more strict than any of their friends, parents in terms of usage. In terms of education and warning. You know, my youngest son is 13. He’s neurodiverse and. All of his friends are calling him 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night. He’s asleep by nine.

But I can see them ringing ’cause the phone’s not in his bedroom. He’s begging me for TikTok, No, absolutely not. My oldest son is now 15 and he’s just got Snapchat because I feel that he’s now proven himself in terms of responsibility but also that I had the time for education, how to use that properly.

To mirror your point, it’s exactly right. Fear of missing out. All my friends are there. They’re missing out on the gossip, on the conversations after school. But this isn’t social media. It’s essentially a group call.

It’s perhaps, I would argue, that it’s the mobile phone usage element that’s perhaps more dangerous than social media itself. It’s where they’re consuming and what devices they’re consuming it on that are perhaps more impactful than the the platforms themselves. Although, obviously they’ve got a lot to do to help these audiences.

[00:24:28] Anna McShane: I used to be a teacher and at one point I would the biggest buyer on Amazon of those really simple alarm clocks. Yes. The amount of teenagers I would have say, well I have to have my phone in my room ’cause it’s the only thing that wakes me up.

And I was like, okay, there’s a three pound alarm clock and you can keep your phone downstairs. Thank you very much. Exactly. I think it is bigger than social media.

[00:24:51] Tanya Joseph: Anil, do you think the answer is more regulation and is there a risk that more regulation impacts on the pace of [00:25:00] change?

[00:25:00] Neil Kleiner: Look, I’ve lived through the smoking ban. I’ve lived through, a parent who smoked and negatively affected his health. Guess what? I smoked. I think that particularly with children, we’re always going to find hacks and workarounds and ways to engage in the things we want to.

And if they’re banned, it’s even more illicit and more exciting and more rebellious. Um, I think that we, we can’t scare kids off ’cause they will find work. We’ve proven, they will find workarounds. Um, you know, we have to equip them with knowledge, with experience. Uh, and that definitely means more digital literacy in school.

Absolutely. But also more role models in culture. Creators who talk about screen limits and brands that reward balance, that talk about this kind of alignment of values versus [00:26:00] alignment of, of kind of products. If Gen Z grew up as the Guinea pigs of the algorithm that dominates social media, gen alpha definitely deserve better.

Brands need content that builds, not breaks. Confidence in terms of how they can communicate the benefits of this stuff, the benefits of creativity, expression, and that element of finding your people, finding passion topics. It would be almost a travesty if they missed out on that.

It is the platforms. It’s not social media as an idea. I think it’s about knowledge and education as to how we use it.

[00:26:49] Anna McShane: I mean, I think every year of  inaction that we don’t have is another generation growing up, under these algorithms, which are [00:27:00], I think dangerous. I mean there’s quite a big cohort of people in this country. I wouldn’t put myself in this that would frankly just turn the internet off, that they’re so worried about what we are doing to our young people. I do think that, yes, education and teaching and helping young people engage in this healthily is important.

But I do think regulation has to play a big part in that. There will always be workarounds. We have a seatbelt law in this country. Every now and then you see children without a seatbelt on. Or, parents aren’t meant to buy alcohol for their children, but sometimes, they could if they wanted.

There will always be workarounds, but I don’t think that perfection should be the barrier to progress here. In terms of what the polling said of where the appetite is from the country and actually doing something. It was basically around having 16 as a cutoff for social media and using some form of, digital ID [00:28:00] to do that.

Often people can agree with things in polls without thinking further along the lines of what that actually means. But even when you tested if that meant slower loading times or it meant adults had to give their information to the Government in some way to be able to access social media. The support still sustained. So I just don’t see how as a country, we can’t begin to go down this path, but I think it’s also important to reflect on the fact that the Online Safety Bills started in 2018 and only really came into power in 2024.

Policy makers are going to have to get a lot quicker at this and it’s gonna have to be very active because you’ll ban something and something else will pop up. This can’t be a once a parliament-type of legislation. This has to be a constant battle.

[00:28:55] Tanya Joseph: So finally those people that know me know that I like to be hopeful, not in the kind [00:29:00] of passive, let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best kind of way, but that act of activating hope. Please tell me there is some hope for the future and that what we should be doing to make that happen?

[00:29:16] Anna McShane: Well, I, I think so. Groups like Smartphone Free Childhood have mobilised an incredible amount of parents. This issue is not going away. In the first instance, quite soon we’ll probably see a proper ban of phones in schools. Lots of schools do it already.

I did it in my own school, but not not having to have that argument with parents. That it was your decision as a school to do that. I think will be quite transformative. The unions didn’t really back this probably a year or two ago, and now are getting more and more complaints from their members of this as being a real issue in schools.

So I think we’ll probably see that relatively quickly in terms of the ban for under sixteens.

[00:30:00] I think the government are keen to let the Online Safety Bill bed in a bit, and the new children’s codes, and they’re also keen to see what’s happening in Australia. It’ll be sort of our job to make sure we’re giving them the evidence and talking them through how that’s working. It’s bigger than just social media. It is about the phone itself and that constant access, so there’s conversations around potentially a safe phone for children.

I’m sympathetic to that, but I think my worry would be a fairness point in that we know that actually most children get their phones as like a hand-me-down from their parents. So there isn’t actually a big market for buying a phone for your child. And I would worry then that we’d have middle class kids on these, on these safe phones and working class kids, not because they’re just getting a phone from their parents.

It’s important to make sure that we’re stepping outside of our bubble and making sure that the rules that we’re putting in place are working for all children and not just the ones that perhaps we can see. [00:31:00]

[00:31:00] Tanya Joseph: Neil, bit of hope from you.

[00:31:02] Neil Kleiner: I think brands need to prioritise trust. Create content that makes people feel better, not worse.

A lot of stuff that brands put out just makes people feel a bit rubbish about themselves. Support mental health. Prioritise values, not just value of your organisation. Promote balance, invest in communities. Invest in grassroots, communities, not just cliques, but don’t glamorise hustle culture.

Push toxic filters or jump on youth trends without purpose. If your content gives teenagers anxiety, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. I think, you know, it’s for brands, that’s one element. But I think obviously we have to hold the platforms to account. They have to do more.

It’s great [00:32:00] the work that you are doing, I think it’s entirely needed. B, I think the one group that we need the most. Support on the parents. I don’t think they know the damage that they are doing. It’s a bit like the first generation of smokers were like, “oh, it’s great, it’s glamorous. It’s not gonna do us any harm.”

We haven’t learned that lesson yet, and it’s up to us to make sure that when kids are at home, it’s not the mobile phones that are like the square au pair, like the telly, you know, “I’m chatting to my mates – Just play on your phone”. No, understand what they’re doing.

Understand the impact it’s making on your children and provide the right kind of discourse and conversation around it. Don’t think telling people off is the right answer. I think it’s about openness and conversation and making sure that there’s no secrets that people can [00:33:00] feel, that they can communicate about what’s happening to them, what they’ve seen.

I do have hope for the future. I absolutely do because I think social media started as a really wonderful idea. After 20 odd years working in this industry, I’m fully aware of the dark chapter that we’re in right now. Facebook was launched 22 years ago. I think we’re in our weird, early twenties at the moment.

Hopefully as we reach our late twenties, early thirties, we’ll regain what made it amazing. And that was the idea that anyone could find something, find someone, and communicate to the world in a really powerful way. Not what we’ve got right now, which is toppling governments and creating wars and making people feel pretty bad about themselves.

[00:33:57] Tanya Joseph: Okay. Thank you very much. I suspect we will come back to this topic [00:34:00] time and again, Neil, Anna, thanks a lot.

[00:34:02] Neil Kleiner: Thank you. Thank you for having us.