Tag Archives: social media ban for under 16s

Mathew on Monday: Banning Under-16s from Social Media is the Wrong Answer

By Mathew Hulbert | Mon 15th June 2026 - 5:45 pm

The newly announced ban on social media for under-16s may be politically popular, but popularity alone does not make good policy. As liberals, we should be deeply sceptical of blanket bans that restrict freedom while failing to tackle the root causes of a problem.

There is no doubt that social media can be harmful. Young people are exposed to bullying, misinformation, unhealthy content and algorithms designed to maximise engagement rather than well-being. These are serious concerns and they demand action. But the question is whether an outright ban is the right response.

I do not believe it is.

First, the proposal is likely to prove largely unworkable. Teenagers are often more technologically adept than the adults seeking to regulate them. VPNs, alternative platforms and borrowed accounts will inevitably undermine enforcement. Even child-safety campaigners have warned that a rushed ban could quickly unravel in practice.

Second, it risks creating a false sense of security. The real problem is not simply that young people are online. It is what some tech companies allow and actively promote online. Harmful content, addictive design features, endless scrolling and opaque algorithms are business choices. A ban focuses attention on children rather than on the corporations profiting from their attention. Critics have rightly argued that stronger action should be directed at platform design and algorithmic harms.

Third, social media is not universally negative. For many young people, particularly those who may suffer from social isolation and so on, it can provide friendship, community snd support that may not exist elsewhere. An outright prohibition risks cutting them off from those connections.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged assisted dying bill and makerfield by-election | 31 Comments

Protecting children shouldn’t mean abolishing their right to privacy

By Tara Foster | Thu 11th June 2026 - 6:55 pm

An alarming shift has been taking place within the Lib Dem Parliamentary Party over the last few months. Spearheaded by MPs such as Munira Wilson, Danny Chambers, and, most alarmingly for me, Vikki Slade, we are apparently now back to advocating for a ban on social media for children and supporting a ban on images depicting nudity being stored on their devices.

I am very worried that the Party has not thought about how this could plausibly be implemented. I fear that once this dam breaks, once we move past a “think of the children” argument over a moral panic, then the same software which this policy requires will be able to be reused for surveillance and censorship. I worry that we are unknowingly advocating for the implementation of the sort of intrusion usually reserved for times of war, not to mention encroaching on Article 8 of the ECHR.

Article 8 of the ECHR is the famous right to privacy, which is the idea that people have the right to live their lives free from unreasonable and unnecessary intrusion from others, including the state. Government mandated spyware would very much fall into breach of that. This policy would require all phones to have specialist software which scans every outgoing or incoming image for signs of nudity. Client-Side Scanning essentially turns the user’s own device into a state informant. It breaks end-to-end encryption by scanning the image before it is encrypted, creating a permanent backdoor that can easily be repurposed for political censorship or surveillance. This is highly problematic. It is also very possible, and cannot be dismissed, that this image scanning software could be further weaponised to censor other things which are currently legal, such as same sex relationships and intimacy.

Posted in Op-eds | 11 Comments

Civil liberties and the proposed social media ban

By Shane Burke | Sun 3rd May 2026 - 11:55 am

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

Posted in Op-eds | 9 Comments

Why banning social media for under-16s would harm queer young people

By Tara Foster | Wed 28th January 2026 - 3:10 pm

Social media is a problem. It is addictive, it has damaged attention spans, and with the rise of AI bots it is increasingly polluted by content that is fake, manipulative, or actively harmful. These are real issues, and they deserve serious policy responses.

That said, my view on this is simple: a blanket ban on social media for under-16s – especially in the world as it currently exist – is a bad idea. Worse, it risks causing serious harm to one particular group of young people: queer children.

For many queer children, being different in who you are comes with a price that we cannot shake: the quiet but constant cost of standing out in environments that still reward conformity and punish difference. I was one of the lucky ones. I went to secondary school in a fairly affluent part of Eastbourne, and by the end of Year 9 most of the queer and neurodivergent students (a Venn diagram that is practically a circle) had found each other and formed one social group—loosely shepherded by an equally neurodivergent head of music.

However, I know many people, including several friends and, indeed, my partner, who were not so lucky, and being a young queer kid led to social ostracism – and not just at school. Some people in my social circles had their teenage years in the New Labour era, before the axe of austerity led to the end of most council-run Youth centres. However, they have told me that even with the existence of these essential third spaces, they were not places they could go. Queer kids got beaten up. If you were gay or trans then there wasn’t a hope in hell of being accepted by your peers, not that the aftershocks of Section 28 made this any better.

(As an aside, If you want an excellent insight into what it was like to grow up queer in the UK, I’d strongly recommend watching What It Feels Like For A Girl – which is based on the memoir by Paris Lees.)

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged LGBT and social media | 5 Comments