The Government is considering following Australia’s lead with a blanket ban on social media for under-16s. It’s a move that will appeal to anxious parents and play well in focus groups. It also represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both the problem and the solution.
This isn’t to dismiss legitimate concerns about children’s online experiences. The evidence on mental health impacts is real and concerning, particularly for young people already vulnerable. Algorithmic amplification of harmful content, cyberbullying, and the manipulation of attention through addictive design features cause genuine harm. Parents are right to worry.
But a ban throws the baby out with the bathwater. It looks decisive whilst avoiding the harder work of actually fixing anything, and in the process, eliminates the genuine benefits alongside the harms.
The practical problems are obvious
Age verification technology remains unreliable and privacy-invasive. Australia’s ban, which only came into effect this month, relies on platforms policing themselves – the same platforms that have consistently failed to enforce their existing age limits. VPNs and workarounds are readily available to any teenager with basic digital literacy, which is to say, most of them.
More fundamentally, a ban creates an unregulated underground. When young people inevitably access social media anyway, they’ll do so without adult guidance or support, less likely to report problems or seek help when things go wrong. We’ve seen this pattern before with abstinence-only approaches to sex education and drug policy: restricting access doesn’t eliminate risk, it just pushes it into the shadows.
But the deeper issue is one of rights and autonomy
Children and young people are not simply adults-in-waiting, passive recipients of adult protection. They are rights-holders under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, including the right to freedom of expression and access to information. These rights don’t disappear because we’re uncomfortable with how they’re being exercised.
For many young people, particularly those who are LGBTQ+, disabled, from minority backgrounds, or geographically isolated, online spaces provide crucial community, information, and support that may not exist in their immediate physical environment. Social media is also where civic life increasingly happens. Youth climate activism, political organising, and public discourse occur online. Excluding an entire age group from these spaces is excluding them from democratic participation at precisely the age when political consciousness typically develops. We can’t simultaneously lament young people’s disengagement from politics whilst banning them from the primary forum where political conversation occurs.
What would actually work?
The answer isn’t another badly designed law, it’s properly addressing the actual problem: platform business models that profit from harm. None of these proposals are untested fantasies – elements exist in various jurisdictions – but nowhere has implemented them comprehensively or with adequate enforcement.
Rather than banning access, we should be banning the business model. That means:
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