Beeban Kidron, who was appointed Baroness Kidron of Angel in 2012

A FORMER Hollywood director who once held the clappers on actors Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones’s Diary sequel The Edge of Reason has warned that childhoods are being stolen by non-stop smartphone use.

Beeban Kidron, appointed Baroness Kidron of Angel in 2012, said she welcomes the new online safety bill, and said she was now devoting her life to challenging a “toxic” online landscape.

“This was a crime against a generation,” the peer said, explaining how witnessing the impact relatively new smartphones at the time were having on teenagers drove her to give up her work as a director and forge an entirely new path. “It was like stealing childhood.”

The former filmmaker, who also directed Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze in To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything!, described how during the course of making her film In Real Life she was horrified by what she saw as a burgeoning new reality.

“I spent hundreds of hours with kids in their bedrooms filming them. And so I did a lot of the things they were doing. If they were gaming, I was watching. If they were watching porn, so was I. If they were going to meet-ups or falling in love, I was there. So I saw a lot of things that perhaps other people hadn’t seen first,” she said.

The peer, who lives in a quiet backstreet of Angel close to St Mary’s Primary School, said she realised with horror that it was a “wholly designed environment” but not one with children’s needs in mind, adding: “I interviewed a lot of people who played a big part in creating the internet and they kept on saying this thing about a utopian vision of the internet was that all users would be equal, and I just got this like pain in my side because I thought, well, if all users are equal then we’re treating kids as if they’re adults, and that’s not OK.”

A culmination of the last 10 years of work, the Online Safety Bill, expected to be given Royal Assent by November, has inched its way through the Lords.

Key changes will include stronger attempts to verify ages of people accessing online pornography and new criminal measures for people who send unwanted communications and pictures.

She describes it as “detoxifying the online landscape” and said it will act, effectively, as a set of brakes and an air bag for an out of control car being driven by a child at the top of a hill.

Her biggest “beef”, as she calls it, with the tech giants is that they are exploiting children, accusing them of putting children back up chimneys “150 years after we pulled them out of chimneys for very specific reasons, and put them in schools”, she said. “All of what they’re doing is creating data. All of what they’re doing is creating eyeballs for advertising. It’s to do with economic exploitation: they’re working for the man.

“Child labour. Do you know what I mean? Quite apart from all the inappropriate stuff.”

Baroness Kidron is worried about the impact tech has and how it can rewire children’s brains to the point they can’t go anywhere without them and they want to get married just so they can post it to Instagram, but she insists she is not against it in principle.

Advising youngsters to get into making tech rather than consuming it, she said: “I’m not against tech, I’m against the business model that builds its fortune on the backs of children.

“Children are not equipped to deal with notifications through the night that stop them from sleeping.”

She describes how teams of behavioural psychologists work at big tech companies precisely to work out ways to make their products more “compulsive and addictive”.

Among a raft of changes the online safety bill will bring in will be age gating pornography sites – something expected to be brought in within two years.

Another big success she had, with her 5Rights Foundation, was in winning the fight to get tech companies to release any data relating to young people who have died, to the coroners investigating their deaths.

Describing it as a “very strong and moving campaign”, she sees it as a key plank of the new bill.

“The first point is they’re going to have to be much more careful about what they show kids – self-harm, pro-suicide, eating disorders – they wont be allowed to bombard kids with that stuff,” she said.

“They’ve been going, ‘We’re platforms, we have nothing to do with it. We don’t have any impact.’ That is a position that they have spent tens and hundreds of millions of dollars holding up and for a very long time, far too long in my opinion, people believed that. That is no longer true. The game is up.”