Occasionally, one has the opportunity to comment on developments across two jurisdictions. The proposed social media ban for under-16s invites reflection on civil liberties, children’s rights, and perceptions of government in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom.
With both the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom mulling banning teens under 16 from social media such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and more, this piece warns that the solution to what ails young people is to address the root causes, not pursue crude policies like a ban.
To begin with, for the liberal parties that both Fianna Fáil, one of the current parties of government in the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom’s Liberal Democrats claim to be through their shared membership of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party, this reflexive policy of an online ban for under-16s sets a bad example. What it says to young people is that their lived experience of life online does not matter, and that their civil liberties matter less than those of people over 16. Take the scourge of keeping children safe from online sexual predators, according to the Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report issued by Ofcom in 2024, the age group least likely to identify a fake online profile were those aged 65+. This is surely a key digital media skill for keeping children safe from paedophiles, yet nobody is suggesting granny should be banned from social media.
Maybe the answer to these debates is to actually listen to children themselves, something both the United Kingdom and Ireland agreed to as signatories of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 12, which, in its simplest form, says, “I have the right to be listened to and taken seriously.” This is, to be fair to the incumbent Labour government, what it is trying to do, saying so in a recent Gov.UK press release titled “Government to drive action to improve children’s relationship with mobile phones and social media“. If that is so, hopefully, they will consider a book cited by Professor Paul Bernal, Professor of Information Technology Law in the University of East Anglia School of Law. He cites danah boyd’s (danah spells her name without capitalisation) seminal book: “It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens“. This book argues that an online ban will take away an important freedom from vulnerable teens, which is the freedom to shape their own identity, not be viewed through the personal traits bullies use to torment them.
People often talk as though the internet for kids is all about bullying – but it can often be exactly the opposite, a way to escape bullying. If you’re being bullied for your appearance, your ethnicity your name, your family, your poverty, any health condition – this is particularly important for many disabled kids, neurodivergence, sexuality, religion and much more, the internet can help. None of that has to show – you can create a life where the first thing that people see isn’t the thing that the bullies use to target you.
Prof Paul Bernal
Take a lesson from the Irish past. In 1931, the Carrigan Report on sexual violence against women and children. The majority of the witnesses for the report were women, and they recommended a more forgiving future for people who strayed from strict behavioural standards. Many suggested that educating young women about sex and diminishing the stigma attached to unmarried mothers would lessen the severe prejudices against single mothers, their children and victims of sexual violence. They acknowledged that women were often unwilling to come forward as victims because of the stigma surrounding sexual immorality, and that education and rehabilitation would be more suitable responses than punishment.
The proposals the Irish women made to the Carrigan Report were ignored, and Ireland’s reputation for repression would grow throughout the remainder of the 20th century. If Britain bans under-16s from social media it would be turning its back on what made it different from other countries, its atmosphere of liberty.
* Shane Burke a social liberal, living in the Republic of Ireland, who generally follows the Liberal Democrats when it comes to UK politics.
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9 Comments
The essence of this post is in the (abridged) extract copied below:
“young people… their civil liberties matter less than those of people over 16.”
The key point is that children are not adults, and the law does not treat them as adults. For example, they are forced to attend school, and have extremely limited freedom to enter into legally binding contracts.
There is no inconsistency between adults being able to access certain services while children are banned from accessing those same services.
By all means we can debate whether a social media ban for children is a good idea or not. However it is ridiculous to plead their civil rights in such a debate, because children do not have the same rights as adults.
On the subject of civil liberty and human dignity today (3 May, 2026) marks the centenary of the beginning of the 1926 General Strike. It began because the colliery owners, feeling the impact of the return to the gold standard by the Chancellor (W.S. Churchill) imposed a 40% pay cut and a longer working day on the 1.2 million UK coal miners. To achieve their aims, they locked the men out.
Churchill tried to take over and censor the press and the nascent BBC. Sir John Simon (former Lib Home Secretary) declared the strike illegal and that trades unions’ assets should be seized. The General Strike with other unions collapsed after two weeks but the miners stayed out for eight months getting by in the most appalling poverty. One of them was my Granddad, my then nine years old Mum collected coal waste to keep the house warm and to cook food, and my Granny helped to organise a village (Houghton-le-Spring) soup kitchen.
Yes, it’s all a long time ago, they’ve all gone now, but I hope I will be allowed to salute their memory and their courage today.
Well said. There’s a reason multiple children’s charities have said they don’t want a ban. The world is increasingly online. Most third spaces kids used to go to have been paved over and the ones that remain are prohibitively expensive. Plus, there’s the whole privacy implications – the only way to age gate kids is to make all of us adults constantly show our ID. Finally, it’s not working. Nobody wants a “papers, please” internet – its digital ID via the backdoor.
Sorry, this is the link I meant to share for “Finally, It’s not working” – kids are bypassing it by drawing moustaches on their face. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/children-bypassing-age-verification-social-media-b2968803.html
I’m sad to have to point it out, but to claim that ‘What it says to young people is that their lived experience of life online does not matter, and that their civil liberties matter less than those of people over 16,’ is a complete travesty of a conclusion. It equally says that adults are identifying that social media is resulting in massive changes in children’s behaviour and development showing all the symptoms of addiction and they consider it dangerous and needing addressing – just as children were banned from buying cigarettes which was just one step in a long journey to where we are today with smoking.
The preamble to our constitution includes the vital expression ‘in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community’, and that word balance means we have to consider a much wider spectrum of ideas than just the first thing that comes into our head.
Kids go online because there’s nowhere else to go. We’ve paved over the youth clubs and parks, so the internet became their only hangout spot. We can’t just take that away too. Heartfelt thanks.
Social media bans are focusing on the problem from the wrong end, trying to regulate the users when we should be regulating the platforms. Mandatory age gating of whole swathes of the Internet is an attack on civil liberties of all, not just children. And if we go down that route, only the big platforms will be able to afford the online verification systems that would need to be put in place. If we try to regulate the entire Internet as if it were Facebook or X, then the only things that will be able to exist will be platforms like Facebook and X.
What we should be doing instead is regulating the engagement-farming business model that the big social media platforms use. This means, for example:
* Banning infinite scrolling
* Mandatory algorithmic transparency and scrutiny: requiring platforms to publish details of their algorithms so that these can be scrutinised effectively. Any algorithm that directs users to harmful content would have to be modified.
* Tougher action against platforms that repeatedly allow unlawful content to be shown to users.
* allowing users to opt out of algorithms altogether
* Restricting use of user browsing data to inform algorithms
All of the above are about giving users control over what they see on social media, rather than trying to control whether users can access platforms. It would cause much gnashing of teeth from the tech bros and the US government that protects them, but we have to stand up to them. At the end of the day Big Tech would much prefer bans on certain users as long as they were allowed to continue their harmful practices on the rest of us.
Comparisons with things like tobacco miss the mark because tobacco is inherently harmful, whereas social media can also be beneficial.
I don’t feel I know enough to comment on the details but I do worry that our instincts are not Liberal.
Our immediate response to any issue should be against making anything either compulsory or forbidden except for very strong reasons.
We know why Social Media are often harmful, it’s not an accident but part of the design to be addictive. Profit is the only thing considered.