I acknowledge that “digital literacy” can become propaganda if it simply means teaching children to trust approved sources and distrust everything else.

What I mean is different.

Effective digital literacy should mean teaching young people to critically evaluate all sources, including social media, government communications, influencers, schools, mainstream media, and corporate platforms.

That could include source-verification exercises, lessons on recognising bias and misinformation, workshops on how algorithms shape content exposure, and practical activities involving fact-checking and cross-referencing. Frameworks such as the CRAAP test (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose) can also help students systematically assess information.

The solution is not simply to tell young people to trust the BBC over TikTok.

The better approach is to teach them how incentives work, how algorithms influence attention, how narratives are framed, how data is collected, and how claims can be independently verified.

There are already useful examples of this. Finland is often cited for embedding media literacy into education, helping students develop stronger habits for assessing online information. Research from Stanford has also shown that targeted digital literacy interventions can improve people’s ability to distinguish credible information from false or misleading content.

Taken together, these examples suggest that critical digital skills are teachable and can have a measurable impact.

Stronger platform regulation should focus on transparency around recommendation systems, age-appropriate design, addictive features, data collection, and default safety settings, rather than simply increasing state control over speech.

For example, platforms could be required to publish clearer reports on how their algorithms recommend content, explain their data collection practices in accessible language, and submit to independent audits that verify whether their public claims are accurate.

Of course, the risk is that we replace one form of manipulation with another.

That is why the objective should be to reduce control, not increase control under the language of protection.

Effective policy has to balance genuine child safety concerns with individual autonomy, open access to information, and the danger of making people more dependent on centralised authorities.

Acknowledging those trade-offs would make the debate more honest than pretending the only options are a social media ban or doing nothing.