Addictive apps are bad for children's health it's time for regulation - Devi Sridhar

WhatsApp is for old people. At least that's what my first-year medical students tell me. Young people, especially teenagers, communicate through Snapchat, an app that reaches 90% of 13-to 24-year-olds and 75% of 13- to 34-year-olds across the UK.

It has more than 21 million active users in Britain per month, which is almost one-third of the population, and each accesses the app on average more than 50 times a day.

If we go back to the 1980s and 1990s, parenting was often about keeping children physically safe. A moody 14-year-old wanting to be alone in their room was a normal thing-in fact this was sufficient to protect them. Parents had clear oversight over who their kids were with at home, and the physical materials they were consuming. Fast-forward to 2023 and children are in their rooms, but exposed to an entire virtual world with almost no regulation over the content they see, how much time they're spending on devices or the boundary between necessary social communication with friends and a much darker world of harmful or pornographic material, and predatory influencers.