Need your help with pre smartphone youth photos for new Rage Against the Screens campaign

[JustineMumsnet]

Hi all,
We’re looking for real photos from Mumsnetters’ gloriously pre-smartphone youths for a new Mumsnet ad campaign about getting kids off screens and back into real life (part of our wider Rage Against the Screen campaign).

We’re calling it Your Mum Thinks You Should Live a Little and the basic message to teens is:

1. Your mum was actually quite cool once
2. There’s more to life than staring at a screen and your mum wants you to go out and live it

It’s a celebration of the slightly chaotic, occasionally misspent, entirely offline lives we were living before social media arrived.
Think:

• blurry disposable-camera nights out
• giant trousers and tiny tops
• first festivals
• dodgy fringes
• snogging behind the bike sheds
• actual hobbies
• friendship groups that existed in 3D
• rave/goth/indie/skater/grunge pics
• terrible fashion choices
• chaotic holidays
• badly decorated teenage bedrooms
• anything that screams “1990s”

If you’d like to contribute, upload your photos here.
If we’d keen to use any as part of the campaign, we’ll of course contact you directly first.

We’ve shared a few examples below to get everyone started. Let us know what you think?
Thanks,
Justine

The repeated use of ‘fair challenge’ and ‘point taken’ is a ChatGPT giveaway.

Maybe use AI to generate some photos, then.

As is significantly contradicting the earlier answer, without acknowledging it's changed stance (for example saying thr campaign is aimed at teens in the OP and then in the follow up that it's aimed at parents).

Is Justine a robot now? Is this the matrix?

Elsewhere people are saying the point of this whole thing is to advertise a Mumsnet 'dumbphone.' Does anyone know what that is?

It’s called the Other Phone. The adverts are all over the site.

You can't get kids off phones by nagging them or persuading them it's cool not to be on them. You do it by giving them something else to do, like a sport or hobby.

We have to promote the sports, hobbies etc rather than focusing on the phones themselves.

Ah ok. So it’s not a campaign aimed at teenagers encouraging them to get off smartphones. It’s a campaign aimed at mums to try and make them nostalgic and buy a phone MN is selling. Fine. But be honest about it!

I have a 15yo and she does pretty much everything on your list? Maybe not the snogging behind the bike shed because there isn’t one.

she just also goes online too. A lot of the time being online with friends seems equivalent to back in my day when you’d be on the landline for a friend for hours after school.

it’s an odd campaign as the world is a different place and you seem to be trying to tap into the parents rather than the teens.

I had no idea about the phone thing. That makes a lot more sense now.

Selling a 'dumb phone'. Market to mums on here by getting them to look back on their teen years through rose tinted glasses in the hope they'll buy the phones for their kids. Call it a campaign to get teens about and about.

My kids are in their 20s now but when they were teens the last thing I would have wanted was for them to be out there doing half of what I was bloody up to as a teenager!

Leaving the naked pictures aside, my teenager’s entire vision for her life is never ever doing anything I do or say so it’s still an odd tag line for me. I think she’d be horrified by all of this and definitely disengaged.

It did actually make me think about how much fun I had pre phones though so maybe you’re targeting the wrong generation!

reported

Report what?

Yes, a campaign of 'Your mum thinks you should ...' is probably the most effective possible way to ensure teenagers don't do whatever it is.

It seems where Trump goes, MN follows ?

Will this be made in China ? Will deposits be refundable ?

This is all very weird because googling the wider campaign now I found this, which (whether you entirely agree with it all or not - I do with the points about a business model built on addiction and the difficulty of parenting teens in this context, but don't think the 'ban' is feasible / the way to go) is much better argued...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/26/mumsnet-campaign-demands-ban-social-media-under-16s

"Justine Roberts, founder of Mumsnet, announced the launch of the campaign. She said: “Families are living with the harm caused by social media every day. This isn’t about parents failing to set boundaries. It’s about children being exposed to products deliberately designed to be addictive. Parents are watching the consequences unfold in real time: compulsive use, lost sleep, rising anxiety and collapsing self-esteem, while the companies responsible continue to profit.

“The idea that this can be fixed with better parenting or more guidance is a convenient fiction. You can’t out-parent a business model built on addiction. This campaign shines a light on the damage phone addiction is doing to under-16s and calls on politicians to stop wringing their hands and take decisive action to protect children from addictive technology.”

You can’t out-parent a business model built on addiction.

But you can make an awful lot of money out of it - whatever the age of the product - can't you?

Getting children hooked on something they continue to buy into their adult life has been a perennial preoccupation of the capitalist system.

Not to be too nosey

But can you tell us what you've actually reported?

And who to. If it's about the original picture, reporting a Mumsnet post to Mumsnet may not get very far.

@JustineMumsnet Mumsnet HQ

You really need to take the photo down, naked teen photos have ZERO. Place. Online.

Found this thread after the nude photo appeared randomly in a thread I'm on. Not good @MNHQ, if anyone put a similar image on a bog standard post the chance of it being deleted would (rightly) be 100%. It isn't OK.

It’s a real mixed message - we tell our teens not to post nude photos on line and then encourage them to stay off line by showing them nude photos

Exactly! Ridiculous.

This