It’s time to hold social media giants to account

Where does social media stop and anti-social media begin? How does screen addiction affect mental health? Discuss. Show your working. If you are a girl, stay up until 3am endlessly Snapchatting about it, while exchanging faux-candid selfies and telling each other how nice your eyebrows are.

If you are a boy, load your Fortnite Uzi, grab your manga scimitar and gamify the question by mowing down your enemy as fellow players try to wipe you out.

If you are their mother, agonise about confiscating their phones and turning off the home Wi-fi while running through the unspeakable ramifications.

She will shout, slam and may smash things. You have ruined her life. She hates you. It will be your fault if she self-harms.

He will shout, slam and may smash things. You have ruined his game. He hates you. It will be your fault if he gets bullied at school.

Parenting has always been about choosing your battles wisely but, hand on heart, nothing has prepared my generation for the relentless war of the real and virtual worlds.

This week, Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, urged companies such as Facebook and Google to take more responsibility for the effect they are having on young people.

As this paper launched its Duty of Care campaign (telegraph.co.uk/ duty-of-care-campaign), calling for stringent regulations to safeguard children online, Stevens spoke of an epidemic of mental illness among youngsters exposed to videos of terror attacks and beheadings, bullying and explicit sex on popular networking platforms.

Obesity is increasing in tandem, he added; for too many kids, recreation time is spent in front of a screen.

This comes after the co-founder of Facebook admitted it was designed to be addictive by exploiting people’s “vulnerability” as they gaze at other people’s gilded lives and desperately hanker after the same validation and admiration.

But they are, by and large, grown-ups. Take a smartphone: a toddler only needs to witness the thrilling trill of a push notification once to be completely hooked. Add to that endless “Like” affirmations, those insistent red bubbles denoting “unread” messages and a “pull-to-refresh” gesture that feels as good as a slot machine, and it’s no wonder we are constantly engaged with our devices.

I am addicted. My husband is addicted. Our children are addicted. We all have our excuses for sitting hunched over our phones.

“Darling,” I say. “I am a journalist, I need to know what’s going on in the world.”

“All you know is what’s going on in the John Lewis soft-furnishing department, because you’ve been browsing that website for an hour,” counters my husband, who is on his phone poring over the history of the Durham Light Infantry.

Leading by example, that’s us. I could point out our dependence is mild compared to friends who phone up campsites to check whether there’s a signal before they book, but that’s not the point.

Here in Woods Towers, the Big Daughter is 16 and the Small Daughter is nine. The former has a laptop and a smartphone on which she keeps in touch with hundreds of close friends (is there any other sort?), sharing images of carefully curated perfection on Snapchat and Instagram.

She sniggers when I use fuddyduddy terms such as “online”, scorns email because it’s so slow and thinks Facebook is for losers and old people who are, like, over 30.

Right now, she’s into fake news, except she refuses to accept there’s anything fake about speculation about government cover-ups, assassinations, celebrity body doubles and claims that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Live is going to be better than Coachella.

Is she winding me up, or is she the one being wound up? I honestly can’t tell. Nor, I suspect, can she. When I plead with her to confine herself to bona fide news sources, she mutters about “the establishment” and “sinister forces”.

Small Daughter hasn’t got a phone, so she steals mine to play the construction game Roblox, and to text stream-of-consciousness thoughts to random people in my contacts book.

Speaking of which, I sometimes wish Rosamund Pike had come round when, inadvertently, she was invited over for a play date. I would have confiscated her phone at lunchtime, though, as we have a strictly enforced ban at the table…

I would hazard that none of this is exceptional. Everywhere you go these days, entire families are fixed, glassyeyed, to their own little screen.

I’ve watched teenagers having dinner together, each wordlessly messaging someone else, laughing at different jokes. It’s poignant verging on tragic.

It’s all very well expecting parents to police screen usage as best we can. Ultimately, we care about our children’s well-being more than anything else. But the responsibility is not ours alone to bear. A friend’s 12-year-old son has no phone, so his best mate kindly showed him violent porn on his.

That such material glorifying staged rape should be so easily, casually accessible is horrendous. It is not enough to wring our hands and say it’s too late.

These big corporations make a hell of a lot of money from all of us; in some cases, our data has been stripped out and sold off. Such ingenuity – and yet they bleat that it’s impossible to stem the tide of damaging filth that flows into the phones of kids who haven’t hit puberty yet?

Obesity, mental illness, anxiety and body dysmorphia. Is that to be the legacy of our frenetic connectivity?

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. If we all give the Duty of Care campaign our backing, we can achieve real and lasting change. Blocking unsuitable images could soon be the smartest thing our phones will ever do.

Everywhere you go, entire families are fixed, glassy-eyed, to their own little screen