STOP before you buy. Just take a moment, I ask you, if you haven’t already bought that child in your life a Christmas present, to reconsider if you are going to give them an iPad or iPhone or any gadget with a screen on December 25.

In the past year or so, the world has slowly turned against the social media giants such as Facebook and Google, fuelled initially by their reluctance to pay their taxes but also for their reluctance to take responsibility for their dark influences on the hearts and souls of their users.

People are finally realising that Mark Zuckerberg, the brains behind Facebook, is not just a naive tech nerd in a T-shirt but a hard-nosed businessman with scant regard for his users’ privacy while jealously guarding his own, and cowardly to boot, a man who refuses to answer to critics face to face.

Taxpayers are also rightly furious with Google, another tax dodger, and its sinister algorithms that feed users back the views it decides they should see.

Less understood is that this year has also seen a sea change in recognition of exactly how bad those screens are for young people particularly.

The World Health Organisation, for example, included gaming addiction as a mental health disorder for the first time this year, describing it as “a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour so severe that it takes precedence over other life interests”. Listed in the 11th International Classification of Diseases, the condition has symptoms that include impaired control over gaming, increased priority given to gaming and continuation or escalation of gaming despite negative consequences.

This year too, the NHS launched its first internet addiction centre for young people and adults. The Centre for Internet Disorders, at a hospital in London, is already oversubscribed.

These are two very serious developments in the evolution of the tech revolution. They mark international and national recognition that screens pose a significant risk to the mental health of young people, an issue itself that is a growing concern in this country.

Not so long ago, technology was regarded as “the future” for young people, that any child without an iPad would be left behind and parents who didn’t furnish their child with an iPhone in their pocket, an iPad at school and a laptop in their bedroom was a dinosaur.

Yet this year has also seen a backlash from young people themselves. In America last month, during a visit by President Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and Apple chief executive Tim Cook pupils at a high school in Idaho walked out in protest about Apple’s donation of iPads to all teachers and pupils. It had killed interaction between teachers and pupils, they said, with its self-guided lessons.

Ironically, the school’s superintendent, Jeff Dillon, had told parents the visit was to enable Trump and Cook to “learn more about how our district uses technology to enhance student learning and support our personalised learning model”. Just after the donation by Apple in 2016, Dillon had told the local newspaper: “We are going to shift from traditional education, where teachers own the learning, where the teacher does the thinking and students consume information.”

In other words, he bought the hard sell by Apple without wondering where the evidence was that learning from teachers should be replaced by learning from Apple. It hadn’t occurred to him that Apple’s donation was simply an investment in its future, young people indoctrinated into screen use by the screen industry itself.

This year, in this country too, schools have been introducing bans on mobile phones. At the beginning of this term, secondary schools began a ban following an appeal by culture secretary Matt Hancock. In one school, it led to an increase in pupils playing outside, attending clubs and societies, and socialising with each other.

Boys in one year group at Eton College now have to hand in their mobile phones at night in a new policy designed to reduce the amount of screen time they are exposed to.

Last month, South Hampstead High School sent a letter to parents asking them to make sure their children spend less time on phones at home, restaurant chain Frankie and Benny’s banned phones in its restaurants, and in September, the French government banned mobile phones in schools. Let’s also not forget the hypocritical Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are sending their children to screen-free schools. They, of all people, know that getting young people hooked on their social media platforms is in their best commercial interests – but it’s your young people they want to be hooked.