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:
Prohibiting addictive design features entirely, not just for children. Infinite scroll, streaks, autoplaying videos, and algorithmic amplification of enraging content serve no social purpose. They exist solely to maximise engagement (and therefore advertising revenue) at the expense of user wellbeing. These features harm adults too – the case for eliminating them doesn’t depend on age. The EU’s Digital Services Act requires platforms to assess risks from addictive design, but stops short of prohibition. We should go further.
Mandatory algorithmic transparency and user control. Platforms should be required to allow users (including young users with parental input where appropriate) to choose how content is curated, with options for chronological feeds, interest-based filtering, and adjustable sensitivity settings. The algorithm shouldn’t be a black box that controls what you see – it should be a tool you control. Platforms like Bluesky already demonstrate this is technically feasible.
Proper enforcement of age-appropriate design requirements. The UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code already establishes important principles for how platforms should treat children differently. The problem isn’t the framework – it’s inadequate enforcement, insufficient resourcing for Ofcom, and penalties too weak to change corporate behaviour. Strengthen what we have rather than inventing new laws that won’t be enforced either.
Properly resourced digital literacy education starting in primary school. Young people need to understand how platforms work, recognise manipulation, verify information, and maintain their privacy and security. This should be as fundamental as learning to cross the road safely. But education alone won’t overcome addictive design or algorithmic manipulation – it needs to be part of a broader regulatory framework.
Actual investment in alternative spaces for youth socialising and organising. The reason young people’s social lives primarily happen online is that we’ve systematically defunded youth services, closed community centres, and created built environments hostile to young people gathering in public spaces. If we want children off screens, we need to give them somewhere else to be.
The phone-free schools policy shows a similar confusion
The Government’s plan to enforce mobile phone bans in schools “by default” addresses a real problem – the distraction and disruption caused by phones in classrooms – with a blunt instrument that creates new ones.
Headteachers should absolutely have the authority to set policies appropriate to their context. But a blanket ban enforced through Ofsted inspections removes professional discretion and ignores legitimate educational uses of smartphones, including research and photography, accessibility tools for disabled students, and communication for young carers.
It also misses the point: the problem isn’t the device; it’s the distraction. The same student who can’t focus during lessons because of TikTok notifications can’t focus in the library either. Teaching students to manage their attention and use technology purposefully is a life skill. Confiscating phones for seven hours a day isn’t.
A genuinely liberal approach recognises that paternalism requires justification
How we approach children’s rights and autonomy in the digital age connects directly to questions of power, freedom, and democratic participation. Even well-intentioned paternalism requires clear justification. The threshold for state intervention that restricts individual liberty should be high, and the intervention should be proportionate to the harm being prevented.
Banning social media for under-16s fails that test. The harms are real, but don’t justify total prohibition when more targeted interventions (regulating platform design, improving digital literacy, enforcing existing laws) remain unexplored or under-resourced. And it creates new harms: cutting young people off from community, information, and civic participation.
It’s also a convenient distraction from harder questions about power and accountability. It’s much easier to ban children from Instagram than to force Meta to stop prioritising engagement over wellbeing, to properly fund Ofcom’s enforcement capacity, or to address the commercial surveillance business model that underpins the entire digital advertising economy.
If we’re serious about protecting children online, we need to regulate the companies, not ban the children. That means enforcing existing law, strengthening platform obligations, eliminating addictive design, and empowering young people with the knowledge and tools to navigate digital spaces safely.
Anything less is security theatre: visible action that makes adults feel like something is being done whilst leaving the underlying problems untouched and young people more vulnerable than before.
The question isn’t whether children need protection online – they do. The question is whether we’re willing to do the actual work of providing it, or whether we’ll settle for the easier performative alternative that protects our sense of having acted whilst changing nothing that matters.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
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16 Comments
I’m one of these youths who are enslaved to social media being brainwashed blah blah blah. Let me put it bluntly:
If it was not for twitter i would have killed myself. I have no friends in school, as i am subject to ableist and transphobic bullying. (and the worst bit is i’m closeted – iget all of the negatives w/o any of the positives!)
However, i have moved past that & now only use more ‘closed-off’ social medias, which imo are better. I get the connection i did w/ twitter sans andy of the negative stuff like infinte scroll. I was. however, groomed – so yes we need digital literacy, and we need it fast!
I think a lot of people miss the point on this. A basic rule of the internet is that, if it’s free, then you are the product.
This should be viewed not as a matter of under 16s using social media, but rather that social media companies shouldn’t be using under 16s.
It’s also worth noting that the definition of “social media” in the current Lords amendment (with Lib Dem sponsor!) is an “as defined in the Online Safety Act 2023” one. That is a very broad definition well beyond what people might normally consider “social media” which covers *any* internet application (not just ones seen in web browsers) which allows two or more people to communicate in any way. LDV would certainly be in scope unless the subsequent secondary legislation was worded a lot more narrowly than the OSA’s own secondary legislation.
The ban will be ineffective, just as the dire “online safety” bill has been, and cause problems and unintended side-effects for everyone.
Like many things in life, social media can be both a negative and a positive, and digital literacy is key. Twitter (I refuse to call it X) is my main social media platform, and with a few tweaks of the settings to make it closer to how “Golden Era” Twitter was, I still generally have quite a pleasant and positive experience unlike certain other platforms.
The problem with any policy is convincing parents, teachers and carers that it works. At the moment most see a ban as THE answer, because it’s simple and easy to understand. That it doesn’t work is neither easy to explain nor acceptable to the relevant audience.
I want my young grandchildren to be protected, so our party has a difficult job devising a policy that works and is easily explainable.
We are definitely not there yet
Labour MPs are simultaneously wanting to ban social media for under-16s, but are introducing voting for 16-year-olds. How on earth do they expect political engagement and voting if they cut off the way a huge proportion of them consume information and news? Authoritarian Labour at its best…
I don’t know if a ban on under 16s using social media will work but I believe there is growing evidence of the positive effects on schools when pupils are banned from bring phones to school. It appears that schools report less fights between pupils at social times (probably because they are less easy to provoke and organise) and less distracted pupils in classes.
As a young person, couldn’t agree more. A business practice that fundamentally plays on the flaws of human psychology to get us virtually addicted to social media platforms so they can obtain as much data as possible about users to sell to advertisers is just plain wrong. Banning young people from being able to access these platforms doesn’t actually solve the problem, it just hides it.
There is a bigger problem at stake. We are increasingly living in a “post-truth” world: these platforms have had a destructive effect not just on the mental health of our vulnerable young people, but also the fabric of our democracies and societies as a whole. How on earth can our societies continue to cooperate and work effectively when each person forms their own version of reality detached from the truth?
These platforms are catalysts for destructive and extremist movements that seek to tear up what brings our societies together. The fact that there are people that profit from a business model that polarises society and creates a mental health crisis amongst young people is abhorrent. As Tanya rightly says, it is the business models that need to be regulated out of existence, not just for the benefit for young people, but the benefit of everybody. We desperately require new business models.
I commend the work of the Centre for Humane Technology: https://www.humanetech.com/
Reminder: The proposed Lords ban would apply to even the viewing of websites, while the Australia ban only applies to the creation of accounts on the 10 biggest ones.
What this actually means is literally all adults will need to prove their ID to use sites literally all the time to prove they’re OVER 16. Social media by their broad definition includes any site with a comment section, messaging apps or even Wikipedia. Even this would be affected.
Sorry, but literally no sane adult wants to risk their identity being leaked by repeatedly submitting their ID multiple times to dodgy American start-ups for every site they use. In an era where we just had Grok misuse people’s photos, it seems bizarre that the solution is submitting our IDs en-masse to the very platforms that just abused them.
This law is plainly an excuse for social media accounts to be linked to IDs. The Online Safety Act already went too far – blocking winemaking and self help forums – and we shouldn’t be enabling it to go even further when Child safety protocols already exist as standard on every device. This is fundamentally illiberal.
Thank you, I found this a helpful article
Well said Tanya. A ban on social media is a simplistic solution that misses the point. We need to help young people grow up online. And some adults too. The party should stop using X too, but that’s another debate.
A ban is a privacy and cybersecurity nightmare that will somehow also cost billions I’m sure. Ban phones in schools, educate kids and parents about responsible screen time and dangers online, fine social media platforms that allow young kids on and don’t follow their own rules. But bans are illiberal and unworkable. I don’t see why LDs signed on to this authoritarian mess. The rating system wouldn’t have worked either. It seems there’s very little interest in expert opinion and much pearl clutching.
We are seeing the emergence of a political consensus on this issue that is totally disconnected from expert opinion and from reality. The political class seem to be listening mainly to the loudest and most emotional voices, which assert that social media is inherently harmful to children and the only acceptable solution is to ban them from using it. Absurd comparisons with tobacco and alcohol abound. This hysteria is all too common in debates about child welfare, with “think of the children” being used as a debate killer and McCarthyite labelling of anyone who opposes or even tries to question
extreme and unworkable policy proposals as supporters of paedophilia.
Politicians are often accused of pandering to hysteria, but that is not what is happening here. Rather, they are part of the hysteria. Cool heads are needed, and knee-jerk policy proposals are not.
A liberal policy on children and social media should focus on regulating the algorithms that can cause harm to adults as well as children when using online platforms. Online age-gating is unworkable, especially if it’s going to be applied to most of the Internet. Also it’s a serious error to portray this as a matter of protecting the interests of social media giants. I strongly suspect that Big Tech would accept age-gating of social media in return for keeping free rein over their algorithms. We’d thus get the worst of both worlds.
My concern with children using smart phones is even more fundamental than many views expressed here. To me this begins at the age where children get what I will describe as electronic play toys with an inbuilt mini processor that can keep them entertained for hours with no adult intervention: playing movies, making tunes and including simple games, and the cumulative effect it all has on their brain development. Instant gratification, instant change, almost limitless choice and the phenomenal busyness and speed, create addictiveness.
This can lead to the effective extinction of quiet time, where the absence of something more immediate used to mean that a child ended up looking at something, imagining and thinking hard about it, whether it is a leaf, an earwig or a worm. The ability to concentrate over an extended period of time, and a willingness to learn initially through experience and repetition, forms a sound basis of knowledge based on fact, which is remains a fundamental skill for humankind.
I think my generation was lucky: Born in the 1950s, so technology based entertainment barely existed until through school, university and in a job obtaining a qualification. Nowadays the lack of concentration by a significant proportion of the population certainly has not improved and in all likelihood has deteriorated over the decades.
We do need to change something. The questions are what and how?
I don’t think nostalgia is a good basis for social policy. The supposedly idyllic childhood life of the 1950s and 1960s can’t be recreated, and would we really want to? It’s not just technology, but society that has changed since then. So the paternalism evident in the idea of a social media ban for children is shocking. It’s all rather Victorian-era “seen and not heard”. What is being proposed is to exclude children from a part of modern society. Make no mistake, this is a classic moral panic. Previous ones were about video games, or certain genres of music. Go back further in time, and you find moral panics about television, radio, gramophones and even, when mass literacy was becoming a thing, about reading books! (Supposedly reading was isolating children and preventing them from socialising: sounds familiar.)
Blanket bans are not the answer. “It’s the algorithms stoopid.”
Im sorry but i dont think controlling and banning algorithims are a good idea.
if a company wants to use for-you-page style algorithims then so be it. what we should be focusing on is making sure companies gives users a choice in how alogrithims look like. like you mentioned with bluesky, we should require companies to give users control over what kind of algorithim they want but that shouldnt mean outright prohibiting the algorithims we know on tiktok or youtube, or the infinite scrolls.
more importantly that actual ways we can tackle mental health crises is actually fixing school/work hours to life ratios. so kids can spend time outside of school, in thir spaces same with adults. we need to rethink how education sytems look and how kids can get education that arent wageless 9-5’s. for part and full timers increasing their wages so they are forced to pay money on neccecities only but their hobbies too. they way we interact with social media or games or movies/tvshows are just the symptoms. the cause comes from our real world and how we are forced to have such little time.