‘Spine-chilling’ and ‘Deeply Disturbing’ - The Guardian and Daily Mail reviews for Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones
Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones review – makes you long to lock your own device in a box
Rachel Aroesti for The Guardian
This three-week experiment to study the horrifying effects of the grim content that children can access 24/7 has predictable results – which are nonetheless horrifying.
As a rule, jealousy is not an emotion social experiment TV tends to elicit. To gain insight into the human condition, such programmes usually involve nightmare-level punishments: volunteers agree to sleep on the street or go to prison or marry a total stranger or live like a Victorian person or be marooned on a desert island – the genre is schadenfreude central. Yet watching Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones – which follows a group of year 8 pupils from Essex (plus hosts Matt and Emma Willis) as they surrender their phones to a lockable glass cube for three whole weeks – my response is one of pure envy. What a treat. If only a production company would be so kind as to take my phone away from me.
Swiped, says Dr Rangan Chatterjee as he guides us through the technicalities of the experiment, marks the first time a digital detox has been studied on this scale. This is probably not the coup it first seems. Science has been slow to solidify a causal relationship between smartphone usage and mental health issues, but every sentient being with social media access knows how detrimental an endlessly refreshing feed is to sleep, concentration, inner peace and general happiness. Let’s just say the final data isn’t the most earth-shattering discovery of our time: if your smartphone leaves you distracted, exhausted and anxious, chances are it’s doing the same to your child.
But Swiped is still very much worth watching for its more anecdotal insights. As they await the results, Emma and Matt speak to parents, children and doctors about the scourge of the smartphone, weaving deeply relatable concerns about their own teenagers’ usage into the conversation (Emma was under the impression Matt had put “age restrictions” on their devices; he says he doesn’t even know how to – genuine bickering ensues). The totally ordinary children involved in the experiment reveal some horrifying numbers: one child got her first phone at four, another says she once woke up to 3,000 notifications, another spent almost 10 hours a day on his phone during the summer holidays. We learn that a quarter of 11-year-olds have seen pornography, while research shows first-time users to porn sites tend to be shown violence or nonconsensual sex.
Yet it’s the language that is most discomfiting. These devices are not just “changing the fundamental nature of what it means to be a child”, as Chatterjee puts it; they are redefining what it means to be alive. For many teens, smartphones have become synonymous with existence itself; more than one child refers to their device as their “life”. To be posting on social media is to be, full stop. Parents, conversely, are grieving these children, as if they have been transported to a different realm (“I miss her,” says a teary Matt Willis of his teenage daughter. “I feel like I lose her to it”). Matt and Emma also meet parents whose children have actually died in tragic circumstances closely linked to their social media use.
The existential threat posed by smartphones was never something an accessible two-part Channel 4 documentary was going to comprehensively address, but simply flagging the sheer size and profundity of the issue feels like a start. And the programme does effectively home in on some of the more tangible aspects of the problem – such as the grim content teenagers have access to on their phones. Porn sites, for example, do not currently require meaningful age verification: using two new phones, Matt and Emma encounter highly disturbing material in a matter of minutes. This, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Peter Kyle, tells them, will change next summer thanks to a new online safety act. Another mini-experiment sees the Willises browse TikTok as 13-year-olds; within hours they are being served content about suicidal ideation and domestic abuse. Frustratingly, little progress is being made on this front.
By the end of the experiment, the children seem largely ambivalent about being reunited with their social media accounts. Sadly, they don’t seem to have much choice. Despite being newly convinced that 12-year-olds don’t need smartphones, the children’s general consensus is that there is no way back for them: their lives are now inextricably tied up with their devices. Perhaps, one boy suggests heartbreakingly, future generations could enjoy smartphone-free childhoods. That would involve a load of algorithm-addled adults getting their acts together – AKA coordination between parents, schools, tech companies and the government, which at this stage seems a borderline mythical prospect. Until then, it genuinely feels like our best hope is for Channel 4 to roll out those lockable glass cubes nationwide.
Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones: Depression, self-harm, suicide . . . the chilling risks of teen phone addiction
Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail
This is a strange world, when parents can’t imagine allowing their children to play outdoors unsupervised, but have no idea what they’re seeing indoors on their phones.
Abduction is thankfully very rare. But vile internet content is not, and it seeps into social media sites like poison - sites the majority of adults over 30 barely use, such as TikTok and Snapchat.
Unchaperoned and inexperienced, the millions of children who do use those apps are frighteningly vulnerable.
One girl on Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones (Ch4) told how, aged 10, she was groomed by someone she thought was a friend her own age, who turned out to be a man.
Many of the apps are designed to be addictive, capturing children’s attention for up to 10 hours a day.
Bullying, porn, sexual exploitation and emotional blackmail go largely unpoliced.
And all this is taking a wretched toll on the mental health of a generation.
‘Teens with problematic smartphone use are twice as likely to experience anxiety, and 50 per cent more likely to struggle with depression,’ Dr Rangan Chatterjee told Matt and Emma Willis.
The Willises are a professional celebrity couple, as happy to do Cooking With The Stars as they are to front a documentary about drugs.
But they made the ideal presenters for this, because they have three children aged eight to 15 — and no clue about what risks their phones could pose.
Matt admitted he’s such an avid scroller himself that he sometimes finds himself sitting with his older children in silence, all of them glued to their screens.
‘There are times when I definitely feel like I’ve lost my children,’ Emma admitted.
That fear was echoed by parents at The Stanway school in Colchester, Essex, where pupils were taking part in a three-week experiment - locking their phones in a box and going app-free.
As she consigned her device to digital prison, a girl named Liana spoke for them all as she confessed to feeling, ‘a little bit sad — it’s my life.’
The truly sad thing, of course, is that a technology that didn’t even exist a few years ago - when Matt’s boyband Busted were top of the charts with Crashed The Wedding in 2003, for instance - now controls the minds of these children.
Half of nine-year-olds and more than 90 per cent of 11-year-olds own smartphones, we learned, even though research shows dramatic negative effects on mood, anxiety and sleep.
With the second episode this evening, this is a deeply worrying programme. While it avoided trivialising the issues, it didn’t have time to do much more than touch on some of the most horrible aspects, such as the prevalence of sites that encourage eating disorders and self-harm.
Emma and Matt were speechless and aghast as a grieving mother described how her 11-year-old son, Bradley, hanged himself after a YouTube video triggered an obsession with suicide.
Emma suggested a complete ban on smartphone use by under-14s.
Feasible or not, that doesn’t sound extreme.