Nearly half of British sixteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds told the BSI they'd prefer to have grown up in a world without the internet. Forty-seven percent. Not a fringe opinion from technophobes or Luddites — a near-majority of the generation that never knew anything else.
The rest of the numbers are worse. Sixty-eight percent said they felt worse about themselves after spending time on social media. Forty-two percent admitted to lying to their parents about what they do online. Forty percent maintain a decoy or burner account. Eighty-five percent of young women compare their appearance and lifestyle to what they see on their feeds, with roughly half doing so often or very often. These aren't edge cases. This is the baseline experience.
What strikes me isn't the individual statistics — we've had versions of these figures for years. Back in 2018, Apple's own investors were pressuring the company over youth phone addiction, citing surveys where half of American teenagers said they felt addicted to their devices. Seven years later, nothing structural changed. The platforms got stickier. The algorithms got sharper. The age of first exposure dropped. And now the generation that grew up inside the experiment is telling us, plainly, that they wish the experiment hadn't happened.
Fifty percent of respondents said a social media curfew would improve their lives. Twenty-seven percent wanted phones banned from schools. Seventy-nine percent believed tech companies should be legally required to build privacy safeguards. That last number is the one I keep returning to — four out of five young people asking for regulation that adults have spent a decade failing to deliver.
The BSI's chief executive, Susan Taylor Martin, put it in corporate language: "The younger generation was promised technology that would create opportunities, improve access to information and bring people closer to their friends." The research, she said, shows it is "exposing young people to risk and, in many cases, negatively affecting their quality of life." This is what institutional understatement sounds like when the data is screaming.
There's an uncomfortable parallel with how the AI industry is repeating social media's mistakes — the same pattern of externalised harm and internalised profit, the same rehearsed contrition at hearings, the same gap between stated commitments and actual behaviour. The platforms knew what they were doing to adolescents. Internal documents confirmed it. Nothing changed because engagement metrics drove revenue, and revenue was the only number that mattered in the boardroom.
Forty-three percent of the respondents started using social media before the age of thirteen — the legal minimum. Not because their parents approved, but because the platforms made it trivially easy to lie about your age. Then those same platforms sold advertising against the attention of children who shouldn't have been there in the first place.
The generation that was supposed to be "digital natives" — fluent, empowered, connected — is telling us they'd trade it all for something quieter. We should probably listen.
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