UK Under-16 Social Media Ban: Too Little, Too Late

Starmer Can't, But Burnham Would?

On July 4, 2024, the Labour Party ended 14 years of Conservative government in the United Kingdom and gained a 174-seat majority in Parliament. As leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer took over from Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister.

But despite the impressive legislative majority (Labour's largest in a quarter-century), Starmer has spent the last several weeks and months as a dead man walking. It's not entirely his fault; a variety of outsized problems – the lingering aftershocks of Brexit, the fiscal rot of austerity, wage stagnation, social unrest, cross-Channel immigration, and the price shocks from the Iran war – have made governing a once-powerful nation immensely difficult.

But the former barrister has, to put it mildly, dithered. When you have a 174-seat majority, people expect you to take it out for a spin and see what you can accomplish. But Starmer has demonstrated scant legislative leadership or vision. Equally damaging, in our social media-saturated environment, he has been steadily losing the public charisma battle to right-wing agitator Nigel Farage, Tory Party leader Kemi Badenoch, and most recently, the progressive mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham.

Without question, the left wing of Starmer's majority has been the most disappointed with the lack of progress, but few Labour MPs are happy with the party's poor standing with the public. Under UK law, the Government is not required to hold a general election until July 4, 2029, but there is a broad consensus among MPs and UK political observers that if Starmer goes into an election as Labour leader, he would drag the party to an ignominious defeat.

As Labour has sunk in the polls over the last six months or so, Labour MPs have looked longingly northward, a phrase that describes not only Manchester's physical location, but also Burnham's relative popularity with voters. That was driven home when the so-called "King of the North" entered a by-election in the northwestern town of Makerfield and was elected to Parliament on June 18, 2026. He immediately announced his intention to launch a challenge to Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party.

Starmer's Project Hail Mary

It was against this rather miserable political backdrop that Starmer and MP Liz Kendall, Starmer's Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, announced "a landmark government move to give kids their childhood back."

In a press release issued three days before the Makerfield by-election, Starmer said that the Government would "ban social media platforms from offering services to under-16s." The policy is explicitly modeled on one adopted previously by Australia (more on that below), but the UK is proposing something broader.

In a move to protect children online and address the scale of the challenge, the government will also go further than a blanket ban on social media with world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s. These restrictions – which together with the ban go further than any other country – will apply to a wider range of online services, including on gaming sites. 

The Government also said that it would limit access to "so-called AI 'romantic companion' chatbots" to people 18 and older. Any general-purpose chatbot with "similar intimate functionalities" would be required to abide by the same age restriction.

The announcement follows months of consultation by the Government with tech experts, parents, and children around the country. Starmer and Kendall claim that "9 in 10 parents said they would support a social media ban for children under 16," but there's no citation for that particular bit of data. There's also no corresponding statistic for what children under the age of 16 think.

Many key details of how the ban will work and how it will be implemented are missing. The Government says that its "full response to the consultation will be published in July, setting out further details and decisions on the other policy areas."

The reaction to the proposed policy was decidedly mixed. Tory leader Badenoch supported the proposal, although she described it as "not perfect." In Northern Ireland, First Minister Michelle O'Neill suggested that the proposal had more to do with Labour infighting than actually protecting children.

Some of the strongest criticism came from Ian Russell, the father of a 14-year-old girl (Molly) who committed suicide in 2017 "after viewing online content about suicide and self-harm." In a television interview shortly after the policy was announced, Russell said, "I can't help but think that this is just a rush job when it comes to online safety."

"If you look at the evidence," he added, "the experts, not me, the experts and the people who have worked in this field and other organisations... loads of people, not just in this country, around the world, they all say it won't work."

Does No One Remember Prohibition?

Perhaps the United Kingdom, where beer has been brewed and happily drunk for at least a thousand years, is not up to speed on America's failed experiment with a national alcohol ban. In 1920, a decades-long temperance movement finally succeeded in passing the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" in the United States.

While there continues to be a debate over whether the ban did have some health benefits (many livers were less pickled, for instance), the downsides were serious and long-lasting. States took in substantially less tax revenue in a period of economic hardship, average citizens developed a taste for lawbreaking, and the ban facilitated the rise of organized crime. And as I will detail in a future project, the fight against rum runners and bootleggers sparked the first widespread electronic surveillance (wiretapping) by law enforcement.

The experiment in abstention lasted just 13 years. In 1933, the nation adopted the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed Prohibition and lifted many spirits. There are, to be sure, still some dry towns and even counties in the United States, but those bans survive because of the limited jurisdiction, the relatively small population, and honestly, the ease of purchasing alcohol in nearby "wet" jurisdictions.

In theory, banning children from certain substances or activities should be easier. In the United States, for instance, you can't legally buy alcohol until you are 21. But you'd be incredibly naive to think that kids don't have ways to get their hands on booze.

The same is true, as Australia is finding out, with social media. In December 2025, the country adopted the Social Media Minimum Age Act, which prohibits children under 16 from accessing social media. According to the Daily Mail, a new study released yesterday found that almost 9 out of 10 under-16s are still using social media platforms.

The Australian government has put pressure on tech companies and social media platforms to institute age-verification checks, but they are described by the authors of the study as "sub-optimal." The researchers found that kids easily evade them by using fake accounts and private browsing modes. There's no suggestion that the UK policy will solve this technical dilemma.

Sweeping government bans also tend to attract both industry and diplomatic pushback. All of the major social media companies are contemplating legal action against the proposal (although they are waiting to see the specific details first). The proposal has also been criticized by the Trump administration, since virtually all of the leading social networks are, thanks to the First Amendment, based in the United States. UK officials, The Guardian reported, have "spent weeks trying to reassure senior Trump officials and the US president himself that the restrictions were not specifically aimed at US technology companies."

There's one other way in which social media bans don't work: saving political careers. In the blaze of Burnham's media attention following his win, Starmer's support among Labour MPs began melting like an April snowflake. In an emotional speech in front of No. 10 Downing on June 22, he announced that he would resign as Prime Minister in mid-July 2026. The details of the social media ban and its implementation will be Burnham's problem (along with a host of other issues vexing the United Kingdom).

Parents Should Decide, Not the Government

So if a government-imposed social media ban will not effectively protect children, is there anything that will? Yes – device-specific controls.

It's worth remembering that child access to devices can already be controlled by parents, guardians, or schools. It's probably not possible to completely prevent a young child from using a digital device; they are basically ubiquitous in schools, in the hands of older siblings, or at playdates. But parents can and should delay giving children personal electronic devices as long as possible. It's no accident that so many tech titans refuse to give their children smartphones or restrict their access to social media. Research on school cellphone bans (a prime example of exerting control over devices) suggests that restrictions can produce meaningful benefits.

I know that it's not easy for parents to say "no," particularly when a tween's peer group is filled with kids who have shiny new smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. That's why so many parents tell pollsters that they support a ban; it's easier to tell kids that it's the government's fault instead of looking their 15-year-old in the eye and saying, "I don't think a smartphone would be good for you."

But that approach implicitly undermines citizenship and personal freedom. It teaches children that we can and should allow the government to regulate what we can see and what we can read. Social media is clearly damaging to all of us, and has been fatal to a tragic subset, but relying on the government to control access to information (and most kids get their news from social media) is corrosive to society as a whole.

The solution, then, is to develop a system that would require social media companies to block access to any device used by someone under the age of 16. To do so, we'd need some variation of the following:

1. An identification code installed in every consumer electronic device capable of accessing and displaying social media;
2. A registration system that would make it possible for parents to specify that a particular device (phone, tablet, computer, gaming console, etc.) is primarily used by someone under the age of 16;
3. Strict, DOGE-proof controls on the privacy of device IDs in general and the device registration database in particular; networks and tech companies required to comply with the law would only have access to a list of devices to block, and no other information; and
4. Safeguards to prevent children from altering the status of their devices.

This would put control over child access to social media where it belongs: squarely in the hands of parents. As I've seen in my research, there are some parents who are happy to help their 9 and 10-year-olds sign up for social media, even though that's a clear violation of each company's terms of service. I think that's a ridiculous thing to do, but I don't think a national government should make that decision for them.

There are legitimate concerns about creating a national registry of device IDs, but those concerns are mitigated by the fact that parents would not need to specify the identity of the child using the device. The only thing they would be revealing to the government is that the device is being used by someone under the age of 16.

There's also the problem of older devices. We've dealt with this type of issue before, of course. In 1967, new cars were required to have seat belts installed, but there was no requirement to retrofit older cars. There are still cars on the road today (a very small number) without seat belts. But the replacement cycle for electronic devices is far faster than that of automobiles. It would not take long for device IDs to become ubiquitous on electronic devices.

Creating and implementing this type of approach to protecting children undoubtedly would be difficult. There are a lot of technical and legal issues that would have to be hammered out. But it is precisely the type of substantive, long-term partnership among parents, technology companies, and government that could improve child mental health and safety without suggesting that censorship is the best answer. But apparently, Starmer didn't feel he had time to put together a truly effective solution. It turns out he was right.