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.)
As someone who currently works in education, especially as a member of staff who is trans herself, it is clear that this hasn’t gone away. As supply staff, I work in a diverse array of schools of very different characters, but one thing unifies them—queer kids are still the different ones and statistics show that they are still disproportionately the victims of bullying. The Government’s draft PSHE and Citizenship guidance actively makes this worse, positioning trans identities as contested and controversial, and effectively legitimising the idea that trans students are a problem to be managed rather than young people to be supported.
This is where social media matters. For many queer young people, online spaces are not a luxury or a distraction—they are a lifeline. They are how young people discover language for who they are, find others like them, access support, and realise that they are not alone. For a teenager in a hostile school environment, with the potential addition of unsupportive parents, an online queer community may be the only place they feel seen or safe.
So now, with Danny Chambers MP calling for a total ban on social media for Under 16s, we need to think seriously about what this would actually mean in practice. Not for an idealised child with supportive parents, a progressive school, and access to well-funded youth services, but for real young people, living in a country where austerity has hollowed out almost every meaningful form of state-provided social infrastructure.
If we are going to cut off digital socialisation, then we must be prepared to fund real, physical alternatives: safe youth spaces, properly resourced pastoral care, mental health services, and inclusive community provision. Without that, a social media ban does not “protect” young people, it just isolates them.
After Covid, we already know what widespread social isolation does to children and teenagers. Educational outcomes suffered, mental health deteriorated, and many young people are still dealing with the long-term effects. Reintroducing that isolation by policy choice, without rebuilding the social world that social media has come to replace, would be a profound mistake.
* Tara Foster is a LibDem campaigner from Southampton. She sits on the LGBT+ LibDems Executive as an Ordinary Member and is a prominent member of the Radical Association.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Debt-ridden graduates claim they are seen as cash cows
Why non-fiction books need their indexes
Changes in status: Local Elections wrap up
Mary Reid
Meg Thomas
Institute of Urban T
Tristan Ward
Mick Taylor
5 Comments
There’s a lot of sense in this if I may say so and it justifies the “traffic lights” proposals the party has put forward.
This is difficult. Many policy choices involves some people benefitting and some people losing. I have always thought of myself as a utilitarian liberal, by which I mean I support the greatest good for the greatest number. For example, I support the minority of higher earners in our country paying a lot more tax so that a much larger number of people can be slightly better off.
In the case of social media for the under 16s, I believe hugely more young people will benefit from the proposed ban than will be disadvantaged – I therefore support a ban but recognise other measures are needed to address the issues you identify.
Agree with Joan that if we follow the utilitarian liberal principal, then more children will be helped/protected than potentially disadvantaged by a ban. The evidence of harms is well documented and it would be irresponsible of us as a party to ignore it.
What the author describes about their school days should give us all cause for alarm, children should not be ‘shepherded’ in that manner by a teacher. If the author was describing a religious belief we would label it grooming. All the more reason to give very serious consideration to a social media ban for under 16s, so that their contact with such ‘shepherds’ is limited.
Reminder that this ban would effectively mean Digital ID via the backdoor.
The Lords’ definition of Social Media is so broad that the only way banning under 16 year olds will work is for every single adult – all 70 Million of us – to constantly prove we’re Over 16 – by uploading our ID to view every single website with any user interaction – including this one. Information that can easily be hacked and leaked. Constant “Papers, please”.
Forcing a load of vulnerable young people to upload their personal information repeatedly to dodgy American companies in the era of sexualised AI deepfakes to access legal information is fundamentally flawed and actively malicious. This does not make anyone safer. The Online Safety Act already restricted access to Self-Help forums.
Despite promises that they wouldn’t keep your data, Discord had a huge data breach last year. Many Age Verification services are facing lawsuits for failing to handle data appropriately. Most sane Brits rightly don’t want to constantly upload their ID and understandably so. It goes against literally everything we’ve ever been taught about internet security.
This new law is so bad even multiple Children’s Charities have come out against it. Online is the main way kids play, make friends, learn, interact, study.
TLDR: There is no such thing as only banning kids – the reality: everyone is banned unless they’re willing to constantly submit to invasive identity checks.
Chanelling an old political catchphrase, “It’s the algorithms stupid”. Much of the current discourse about this issue is based on an assumption that social media is inherently dangerous for children. It isn’t. What’s harmful is the algorithms designed to create (psychological) addiction and the bots that pollute the space with fake content etc. So I agree with the OP, a blanket ban on social media for under-16s isn’t the answer. Apart from it pushing the problem elsewhere (the dark web) there’s a danger that once the ban is in place, that will be seen as “job done”, and regulation of social media platforms would then be much lower priority, even though algorithms and harmful content are bad for adults as well as children. And you can be absolutetly sure, the big social media platforms would be very happy with a blanket ban on children using their services in place of meaningful regulation of their business models.
Those who cite the “utilitarian” principle as a justification for the ban seem to assume that it would only impact children. This is absolute rubbish, it would impact anyone wanting to use social media due to the intrusive age-verification systems that would be necessary to log in. I for one would rather not use an online service at all than have to hand over my data and webcam picture to some dodgy US-based fly-by-night with questionable business ethics.