A Social Media Ban Won't Save Our Children. It Could Still be the Right Move.
Britain's proposed restrictions on under-16s acknowledge that the status quo has failed. The real test, however, will be whether governments can force technology companies to change.
On Monday, parenting WhatsApp groups across the U.K. and beyond lit up with the news that many had been hoping for: Britain is poised to become the latest country to draw a hard line on children's social media use.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government plans to approve a ban on social media for under-16s by Christmas of this year, with implementation expected in spring of 2027. He said that social media is making children unhappy and is making it easier for bullies to abuse children. It’s also "designed to be addictive" and a ban would give children more time, security, and more freedom to grow up.
"That is all any parent wants,” Starmer said. “They want to know that Britain will be better for their children, that they will get a fair chance.”
The U.K. is far from the first country to take steps towards this sort of ban, and it likely won’t be the last.
In December, Australia implemented the world's first nationwide ban for under-16s, while France, Denmark, Greece, Spain and several other European countries are introducing or considering similar restrictions.
Inspired by a large and rapidly growing body of research, governments across the world are converging on the same conclusion: the era of relying on social media companies to self-regulate children's online experiences has come to an end. There’s a general consensus that platforms designed to maximize engagement are fundamentally at odds with children's wellbeing. That’s just the way capitalism works. The question is no longer whether governments should intervene, but how.
The evidence underpinning that shift is difficult to dismiss. Many studies have linked excessive social media use to anxiety, depression, poor sleep and lower self-esteem among adolescents. And the effects appear especially pronounced among girls, who are more likely to experience appearance-related pressures, cyberbullying and harmful patterns of social comparison.
A study published by the European Parliament in 2023 found that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to experience negative body image and eating disorders in connection with their social media use. It also established that girls and women are more likely to experience sexual and gender-based abuse on social media, including image-based sexual abuse, which might include receiving unsolicited images, being asked to send nudes and having their images shared.
All of this means that bans, in principle, are praiseworthy. But, as ever, good intentions do not make for good — or effective — policies.
The first unanswered questions relate to implementation. How will age verification work? Will platforms rely on government-issued identification, facial age estimation, parental verification or some combination of the three? And how will privacy factor into all of this? Let’s also not forget that many teenagers won’t struggle to circumvent digital restrictions — whether through VPNs, borrowed devices or by using adult accounts.
The second question concerns responsibility. Starmer has placed the burden on technology companies rather than parents alone. But this inherently assumes that these companies — who, as a reminder, have built business models that fundamentally depend on maximizing user engagement — will enthusiastically embrace measures that will most likely reduce it. Without robust oversight and meaningful penalties, compliance could easily become performative.
Finally, there is the question of what success actually looks like.
If teenagers spend less time on Instagram, is there a chance they’ll simply migrate to encrypted messaging apps, or other, smaller and emerging platforms? Especially with the emergence of AI, online harms are evolving fast. Can legislation ever really keep up?
None of this is an argument against intervention. The status quo has plainly failed. But a social media ban should not be mistaken for a cure. At best, it is the opening chapter in a much larger conversation about how societies expect technology companies to protect children — and about what growing up online should actually look like.
