"If I had small children today, I would rather have them smoke than leave them alone on social media," the prime minister said at a conference on artificial intelligence and child safety.
She is now backing down from the statement and apologizing.
"Clearly children and young people should not smoke. Just as children should not be alone on platforms, where they risk seeing harmful images, being offered drugs, being groomed or blackmailed over intimate images. Yesterday I wanted to provoke us adults to understand how vulnerable our children are on screens," she wrote in a Facebook post.
