UK Considers Australian-Style Social Media Ban for Under-16s
The UK government has initiated a three-month consultation on implementing an Australian-style prohibition on social media access for children under 16 years old. Announced by Liz Kendall, this proposal represents a significant policy response to escalating concerns regarding young people's mental health, exposure to online abuse, and harmful digital content. At first glance, such a ban appears straightforward: shield adolescents from platforms that can exacerbate psychological distress and social pressures.
The Complex Reality Behind Digital Harms
However, as an academic who has dedicated years to studying young people's digital lives, relationships, and overall wellbeing, I argue that a blanket ban fundamentally misunderstands both the problem and potential solutions. My extensive research with teenagers consistently reveals that the harms experienced online are not distinct from those encountered offline. Issues like bullying, racism, sexism, coercion, social exclusion, and body image anxieties all predate the advent of social media. While digital platforms can amplify these negative dynamics, they do not create them from nothing.
In focus groups conducted with adolescents, including research carried out during the pandemic, participants described online existence as a natural extension of school corridors, peer networks, and local communities. Scholars increasingly refer to this as a "post-digital" reality, where young people perceive online and offline worlds as a single, interconnected continuum rather than separate spheres. This integration means that harms are socially rooted, making purely technical restrictions like age bans unlikely to resolve underlying issues.
The Practical Challenges of Enforcement
A ban treats social media as the primary problem, rather than prompting deeper examination of why behaviours such as harassment, shaming, misogyny, and exploitation occur in the first place. Furthermore, age-based prohibitions face substantial practical enforcement difficulties. Young people are resourceful digital citizens; many will find workarounds, migrate to less regulated platforms, or simply falsify their age. This risks driving online activity underground, away from parental oversight, educational support, and safeguarding services.
Instead of engaging with young people in the digital spaces they already inhabit, a ban could make it harder to identify those who are struggling and require assistance. A recent joint statement signed by over 40 children's charities, digital safety experts, and bereaved families warns that blanket prohibitions may isolate vulnerable adolescents from peer support networks and crisis resources, potentially exacerbating mental health issues.
What Young People Actually Need
Many teenagers are themselves critical of social media. In my research on online harms and influencer culture, young people frequently express exhaustion from comparison culture, constant notifications, and the pressure to be perpetually connected. They often articulate a desire for more offline time and meaningful face-to-face interactions. This ambivalence demonstrates that adolescents are not passive victims of technology but can identify problems and envision the digital lives they wish to lead.
Young people consistently ask for better education, more honest conversations with adults, and greater understanding. They want to learn how to set boundaries, recognise coercion and algorithmic manipulation, and manage conflict. Above all, they seek to be taken seriously as partners in addressing the challenges they face. A blanket ban treats young people as a homogeneous group, ignoring the diversity of their experiences, needs, and circumstances. It assumes uniform protection, rather than acknowledging that risks and benefits are shaped by identity, relationships, resources, and individual context.
Parental Perspectives and Societal Context
Parents' viewpoints add another crucial dimension. Research with families reveals deep parental ambivalence about social media. Many worry about online harms and sometimes voice nostalgic desires for a pre-internet childhood era. Yet this nostalgia is rarely about technology alone; it often reflects feelings of parental powerlessness in the face of dominant tech companies, complex digital cultures, and broader social transformations reshaping their children's lives.
Parents describe being torn between wanting to protect their children and recognising that digital communication is central to modern friendship, learning, and social participation. They fear both the risks of their children being online and the risks of exclusion from being offline. In this context, a ban can appear attractive, promising restored order and authority. However, it risks misdiagnosing the problem. What parents truly seek is not mere prohibition but enhanced support to navigate these tensions, including clearer platform regulation, improved school-based education, and more resources to help families manage digital life collectively.
Beyond Simple Technological Fixes
The appeal of a ban lies in its simplicity, but complex social problems seldom yield to straightforward technological solutions. Genuine progress will be slower and less headline-grabbing. It involves investing in high-quality relationships and sex education that reflects young people's digital realities, and supporting parents to have informed, open conversations. It means regulating platform design to reduce exploitation and harassment, while holding social media companies more accountable for their products' impacts.
Critically, it requires rebuilding the offline services and community spaces that provide young people with authentic alternatives. Social media is not an external danger that adolescents occasionally visit; it is woven into their everyday social worlds. By severing young people from the spaces through which they meet personal, interpersonal, and social needs, a ban risks leaving them unmoored and isolated.
A generation growing up in a networked world needs guidance, not exclusion from the environments where their lives unfold. Effective policy must start from how young people actually live, not from adult anxieties about technology. If we want adolescents to be safer online, the answer is not to ban their digital lives, but to empower them with the skills, support, and resources to navigate these spaces wisely and resiliently.
