Well, after much haggling there is actually going to be a social media ban for under 16s, alongside social media curfews for those aged 16 and 17. Luckily for me, it won’t be introduced until Spring next year—by which time I will be over 18. But this social media ban still affects all of us, and spells the end of a free internet.
A social media ban seems good, and well meaning – protecting vulnerable children from the risks the being online can pose—but a well meaning policy does not necessarily mean good policy. For many, social media can help provide a lifeline, a way to connect with friends, experience a world they may not otherwise experience.
Picture a 15 year old, single parent household, caring for their severely disabled brother — perhaps me of a few years ago. The answer to connection cannot simply go out with your friends in real life. For many teenagers, they can’t access a ‘normal’ life, whether that be due to caring locations, or living in a rural area, or being disabled.
But social media allows for this connection — a connection that simply isn’t possible otherwise. We are living in a more polarised world, people don’t always get along, but social media brings the world together. We can see what life is like elsewhere, part of a formation of who we are as a person. There is a lot of focus on the harms of social media — rightly so – but not enough focus on the benefits.
Then we are brought onto the issue of privacy. Many of us protested against the online safety act – requiring us to hand over our biometrics or ID to access certain websites deemed for adults. Now, imagine the same, but much further reaching. Handing over your ID to a shady private company to access twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. These ID companies have already been proven to take a haphazard approach to data privacy. Services like Discord saw user ID and biometrics leaked due to hackers. Biometrics recognition also doesn’t work — aged 16, as a test on Substack, I decided to squint into the camera — and it was happy that I was over 18. Now, I don’t think there is that much explicit content in Lewis Goodall’s comment section, but that could have been any other website. And then there’s the issue of VPNs – allowing you to get around any of these restrictions with relative ease. And the hope of anonymity online? Gone.
Throughout this year we have had the wrong stance on a social media ban. I commend half our policy – that would actually help to make social media safer for under 16s – but condemn the age rating system. This was simply a sneaky way of supporting a social media ban, while making it appear liberal. It had the appearance of liberalism, but behind it was not. It was essentially a blanket ban in the way we see now – we wanted the default age for social media use to be 16 – essentially what is now being proposed. We even proposed banning twitter for those under 18.
This was simply a reactionary policy, designed to criticise the Conservative policy, while not actually staying true to our liberal values. We said we opposed a blanket ban – but continued to vote for it multiple times in both the Commons and the Lords. We claimed they were film style age ratings – but you don’t need to upload your ID to a dodgy website to access The Crown (other television shows are available.)
In short – we need a policy on social media that reflects our liberal values, so that we can once again become the party of civil liberties – not the party that accepts, and actively campaigns for every nanny-statist ban that comes up. We used to gain votes for our strong civil liberties stance – now we are losing ground to the populism of parties like Reform. We are, at heart, a liberal party – we need to start acting like one.
* Cian Tynan is a party member from County Durham. He can be found on twitter (X) at Patrickt08.
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23 Comments
Many years ago, prior to wearing seatbelts became law, my mother was in a multiple car crash that she only survived due to not wearing a seatbelt – she was thrown out the driver’s door before an impact with an oncoming lorry that would have crushed her.
Her story was not, and is not, an argument against the seatbelt law. We know that deaths and serious injuries, overall, fell massively due to the legal requirement. There may be individuals whose unique circumstances meant that wearing a seatbelt caused greater harm, or death, but overall, more people were protected from death and serious injury.
There may be same argument applies to a social media ban. Perhaps some individuals will suffer harm from a ban but far more will be protected from harm than will suffer and more lives will be saved than lost. That is the crux of the matter.
I agree with your arguments, but:
> We said we opposed a blanket ban – but continued to vote for it multiple times in both the Commons and the Lords.
Could you cite which votes specifically you’re referring to?
Until big tech companies are forced to remove dangerous content from their social media platforms children need to be protected, and one way to do that is to stop under 16s having access to that dangerous content online. A legal minimum age is accepted for driving, drinking alcohol, smoking, getting married, voting and much more. It is perfectly reasonable to set an age where people do not have access to everything on the internet. The constant push to allow young people access to more unregulated content combined with AI producing content that is impossible to detect, and expecting them to be able to cope with the consequences is something I fear we and they will live to regret. Many children will ask in the future why they were not protected from what was harming them.
The idea that any Liberal Democrat can support this ban is genuinely boggling. I urge members to read the Bill that Labour have passed. ‘User generated content’ means everything that allows a comment, posting a picture, a video, anything will be restricted unless you provide ID.
We were against mandated Digital IDs because it would have forced people are forced to turn over their private data just to go about their daily lives. THIS IS WHAT THIS LAW FUNCTIONALLY DOES! I would’ve had to upload my ID to send this comment.
Furthermore, there is no wholly safe digital infrastructure to store all of this biometric data. Why is it okay that a third party processing facility can have a copy of my ID for an depth analysis of what sites I frequent? This party has strayed so far from their roots that it is willing to allow owellian survelliance of what we access online purely in the name of protecting children.
If we were serious about moderating content then the party would return to its stance on taxing megaconglomarate social media sites, as it promised in their 2024 Manifesto!
Even Save The Children are against this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S47oBPzphCw
TechDirt did a very good piece on it too. There’s no evidence that kids are harmed by social media. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/16/the-uks-teen-social-media-ban-is-political-theater-not-child-safety-policy/
Cian’s right that this is the wrong call.
On the seatbelt analogy. Seatbelts make an activity safer without removing it. A ban removes the activity itself, including all the legitimate things young people use it for: connection for those who are isolated, finding community when none exists locally, following news and politics at the age when political identity starts forming. We’re not making social media safer for under-16s, we’re removing them from it and calling that protection.
On the practicalities, age verification is the weakest link in the entire policy, not just because it’s flawed right now but because it can’t not be flawed. Any system accurate enough to be hard to spoof is privacy-invasive by design, and any system light-touch enough to respect privacy is trivially spoofable. We saw exactly this tension with the Online Safety Act and chose to wave it through then too.
The deeper liberal objection isn’t really about implementation though, it’s that this treats young people as objects of protection rather than rights-holders capable of judgement, supported rather than excluded. The actual problem is platform business models built on addictive design, infinite scroll, streaks, algorithmic amplification of whatever keeps you scrolling. None of that requires anyone’s age to fix. Ban the design, not the demographic.
I made this case back in January when the consultation first opened. Worth asking why we keep finding the nanny-statist option more comfortable than the genuinely liberal one.
https://www.libdemvoice.org/why-banning-social-media-for-children-misses-the-point-79022.html
@John Barrett – the choice to ban children from social media rather than regulate is the one that will be harder to enforce and will be less effective. It is perhaps politically easier, will annoy the Trump administration less, and makes for a more eye-catching press release.
Remember that social media is a positive experience for plenty of children too, while also causing harm to adults.
I used this analogy in a different thread:
On a typical day in this country, 6 children are killed or injured cycling on our roads. We don’t respond to that by banning children from cycling, because the benefits in terms of exercise and mobility are valuable.
We respond by legislating to make roads safer, which in turn benefits adult cyclists as well as children. Why are we so scared of legislating to make social media safer for everyone?
The worst part about this is those 13/14/15 year olds who were curious to learn and loved science and nature videos will now be stuck watching AI brainrot Nursery Rhymes on Youtube Kids instead because Proper Youtube itself with all that valuable content has now been deemed “harmful”. Liz Kendall told a teacher yesterday on LBC they couldn’t use Youtube in her lesson plans anymore which seems so self-defeating.
It’s so infantilising and I’d don’t get why we’re making teens lose out on all that educational / cultural content. Meanwhile, if teens ran a business online as influencers, they’re now deprived fromt hat too. On top of that, up to even 17, browsing memes past 8:30 PM is now “verboten”. Hands up if you ever spent late night online cramming before an exam? Now you can’t.
Thank you for a most pertinent article which has resulted in thoughtful comments.
As is typical of a government which protects the powerful/wealthy by legislating + against the not so powerful/wealthy, this legislation has not been thought through. for legal consistency, equity and the proper protection of young people.
It follows the American model which excludes the billionaire owners from their responsiblities for what appears on their personally lucrative sites.
All that is needed is to make Social Media owners have the same responsibilities and possible punishements as those who are responsible for print and TV information sites, as is explained in the attached article.
The article below explains that the owners of social media sites could, and should, be the ones subject to proper restrictions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, as are the owners of other main stream media.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/16/inflation-and-revisiting-section-230-make-musk-and-zuckerberg-pay/
@Steve J Smith
“ Hands up if you ever spent late night online cramming before an exam? Now you can’t.”
Really? I was not aware that children were going to be banned from using BBC Bitesize which caters for children up to 16 years of age facing GCSE exams etc.
@Jana: Missing the point. The concern isn’t about what services will still be available to young people after the ban, but the useful services that won’t.
@Steve Trevethan: Sorry to say, you and the author of the linked article are wrong. Section 230 and its analogues outside the US don’t protect just the tech billionaires. They protect everyone who runs any sort of online interactive platform. Zuckerburg et al have recently expressed support for “reform” of Section 230. The reason is simple. They were able to benefit from the open Internet that it created and that enabled them to build their social media platforms. But now they want to shut out potential competition. They can afford the armies of lawyers that they would need if they were held liable as publishers. BlueSky probably wouldn’t. Nor would anyone who runs a WordPress blog (such as LDV).
I wrote on another thread “be careful what you wish for”. If social media platforms were to be regulated as publishers, then that is exactly what they would become. And they would come to relish the control it would give them over what gets “published”. Only content supportive of Trump, Farridge and the rest of them would see the light of the day.
Section 230 was devised in reaction to a lawsuit against an Internet platform from the Wolf of Wall Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prodigy_Services_Co.
Prodigy had been held liable for posts critical of Stratton Oakmont in its fora because Prodigy moderated them for language and topicality. Before S230, a platform was either a pure web host with no control over what got uploaded onto it, or a publisher with all the liabilities that that entailed. S230 was implemented to protect such platforms from frivolous lawsuits. It is as valid now as it was then.
I agree with Jana, well said by the way, and support the ban 100% and the government on this issue. It can cause a great deal of damage, harm and trauma to young people who become addicted and are then referred to counselling.
There are plenty of other ways to find out information offline. Books and papers still exist as alternatives to screen life. Though we do need more youth clubs and services that’s for sure. They’ve been severely cut back.
There are far more interesting things to do than browse memes after 8.30pm and Liz Kendall has taken a brave and bold step towards giving young people their childhood back.
@Jason Connor: Books and newspapers (and the concept of mass literacy even) were once the subject of the same sort of moral panic that now engulfs social media. And of course the panic centred on their effect of children and women (who were then mostly treated similarly to children as “objects of protection” instead of free agents). Actually there was a moral panic around practically every new method of communication or leisure pursuit, with resulting attempts to ban or restrict their usage. These include record players, video games, music genres (“heavy metal, suicide”). We didn’t start the fire. And as I wrote earlier in response to @Jana, what matters isn’t what will remain available for youngsters, it’s what they lose as a result of banning them from what has now become part of mainstream social interaction. Social media is the main channel through which young people can seek help.
Many laws or frameworks that were once bitterly contested are now accepted as part of society. But just as many are those that were once mainstream but now no-one would ever admit to having supported. Examples include Clause 28, eugenics (in the 1920s and 1930s, and including on the political Left), even legalising paedophilia (in the 1960s and 1970s). Hopefully this will also include the present wave of transphobia, and social media bans.
I think the basic idea is that tech companies are now richer and more powerful than many governments while having none of the responsibilities and demonstrating little to no care for vulnerable users. Yet their products are important and prominent in day-to-day life.
Is a ban the right idea? Probably not. Will it work well enough that children are protected? Probably not. Would anything else work better? Probably not.
@George Thomas: What would work better is better regulating the design features of social media platforms, so that (for instance) they have to modify algorithms that are found to lead users to harmful content. What would work better is requiring social media companies full control of their experience, so they can easily modify, bypass or switch off algorithms. What would work better is requiring them to make user profiles easily transferable between platforms, so that users can leave one and start using another. There are lots of things that could be done, but the government doesn’t want to do because it’ll upset TЯump and Big Tech, who ultimately will not mind social media bans as long as they can keep their present business model. Besides, look at all that lovely personal data that they’ll be capturing and can then sell and use for advertising.
Here is the Open Rights Group position (author James Baker is a Lib Dem member BTW).
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/starmers-social-media-ban-fails-to-address-root-causes-of-online-harms/
I fully support the policy suggestions. Banning youngsters is a quick-fix headline-grabbing “solution” that won’t work.
I speak to counsellors who work with young people, mainly children. Referrals by parents due to social media online bullying, unsavoury content etc. are a massive issue. It comes to the point where it’s harming children and ruining lives. A social media ban is the right thing to do. I fully support it and will continue to do so. Social companies are not interested in regulation as they are there to make money so anything goes in that type of wild west environment. They will fight tooth and nail against any further regulation. Labour and the Conservatives have got this one right.
Someone mentioned elsewhere about reversing the smoking ban. The ban prevents vulnerable people from harm caused by smoking. Incidentally smoking causes far more admissions to hospital for respiratory illnesses than does traffic. Apart from some Libertarians on here (incidentally they have their own party now) this ban is highly unlikely to be reversed unless we get a Reform government possibly.
The social media ban will protect children in the long term. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages so it gets my full support and other social liberals I know.
@Jason Connor
“ (incidentally they have their own party now)”
Actually they have two – one for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and a separate one for Scotland.
@Jason Connor: “Social [media] companies are not interested in regulation” so what? If they want to operate in a market they have to abide by its rules. “They will fight tooth and nail against any further regulation.” which is why government needs to be strong enough to stand firm and regulate as far as is necessary. Which means regulating the PLATFORMS not taking the superficially easy, cowardly option of policing the users. A good government will not care if it upsets the tech bros.
The social media ban will NOT protect children or anyone. It will make ALL users less safe by forcing users to hand over personal data to the social media companies or identity verification companies. I mentioned those above. They are, like the social media companies, mainly run by US tech bros who are even worse than the social media ones. (The main one is Palantir, run by TЯump donor Peter Thiel). It will give more power to tech bros and tr*sh user safety and privacy.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/19/uk-social-media-ban-under-16s-big-tech-age-verification
As for Яeform, do you really think they would roll back the new Internet surveillance powers that this government is introducing? They may be saying they will, but you shouldn’t trust them on anything they say. I have said before, when considering expansion of state power, ask yourself what a Яeform-led government would do with it. Under Яeform it won’t just be young people who would be banned, it would be BAME people, migrants and whoever else upsets them. They’d also have a working Big Brother system to track anyone they don’t like.
Proponents of social media bans are assuming that the law will work exactly as intended and there will be no unintended consequences. Well, that’s not how things work. Unintended (or perhaps intended for some) consequences do matter and cannot be ignored. And the unintended consequences are particularly dangerous here.
And the indoor smoking ban is irrelevant: the issues involved are totally different. As for so-called “libertarians” (actually corporatarians, because their ideology is about Big Money being allowed to trample over the rights of everyone else) they are in charge of the systems that will be doing the user profiling that will be needed for the social media ban to work. They very much approve of private companies having the right to spy on people this way, and would rather government controlled the users than the companies.