It’s not benign, it’s not just a way to keep in touch with friends. If anyone wondered what all the fuss was about over social media risks to the under 16s, hearing the voices of parents whose children have been profoundly harmed should leave them in no doubt.

As the Prime Minister announced a ban on platforms including TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X for the under 16s, a group of parents came together in a BBC studio to respond, and in their quiet way, to celebrate.

Each one had lost a child because of online harm. There were so many they had to be seated across two rows.

Among them was Tanya Absalom, the mother of Kady Absalom who took her own life aged 15 in March last year. The appalling shock and devastation of Kady’s sudden death was compounded for the family by not knowing why their girl, an apparently happy teenager, would do such a thing. Then they looked at Kady’s phone and found what her mother describes as “tens of thousands of reels”, to do with body image, feeling invisible and no longer seeing the point in life.

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“When they are shoved down your throat, that amount of content has got to have an effect on anybody’s mental health. Just looking through what was there, it certainly made me feel oh my God, what’s the point,” she explained. “This ban, the raising of the age, for me it’s so important because children haven’t got the cognitive ability to withstand that amount of peppering of harmful........

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