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The U.K.’s Latest Shocking Ban for People Under 16 Is a Mess in More Ways Than One
June 18, 2026 11:30 AM
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Daisy-Daisy/Getty Images Plus.
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Keir Starmer, Britain’s notoriously flaccid prime minister, has shocked the nation by actually doing something impactful this week. On Monday, he gave a speech announcing that from spring 2027, everyone under the age of 16 in the U.K. will be banned from social media. This will include all the widely used platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. It comes after Meta and YouTube were found liable in March for intentionally making their products addictive and harming young people in the process. The ban—along with smart phones being banned in schools in the U.K. in April—is the end result of a government “consultation” on improving online safety for children . It was the second-largest government consultation in the country’s history, drawing 116,000 public responses. People have a lot of opinions about this. The most popular one doing the rounds on social media here right now is a teen who was asked by BBC News what she intends to do with all her newfound free time. “Stare at a wall,” she replied.
Yet the darkest implications of the law may be for adults, not kids.
The U.K. is not the first country to take this step. That was Australia , at the end of last year. We’re unlikely to be the last, either. Germany’s ruling party backs a similar social media ban, as does French President Emmanuel Macron. Spain, Portugal, and Canada have bans in the pipeline too. Our ban, however, goes further than Australia’s, and has therefore been dubbed the “Australia-plus” scheme. Ours will also affect some gaming platforms as well as social media in its strictest sense, and people under 18 will not be allowed to access “romantic roleplay” chatbots. An online curfew for 16- and 17-year-olds is also being floated, which does seem really quite an insane law to impose on a group of people who have just recently been deemed mature enough to vote (yes, we let them do that here at 16).
Naturally, there are some robust arguments in favor of a ban like this. Social media is not an unalloyed good; far from it. You know that, I know that, and the kids know it, too. According to recent polling for a think tank called the New Britain Project, half of 16-to 24-year-olds wish they’d spent less time on their phones, and three-quarters are in favor of tougher regulations to keep young people away from harmful content on social media. Tech companies have been pressed to make their platforms safer, and broadly they have failed, or not put in that much effort in the first place. A ban like this gives parents another much-needed weapon in the arsenal against screen time: No, you can’t have TikTok, because the government said it’s not allowed.
But there are also many, many arguments against it. The most obvious but also perhaps the least important one, in its way, is that it won’t work in practice. Which, broadly, it won’t. We all remember being teenagers. You get around things, or you find ways to hang out that are out of sight of authority figures. Kids in Australia, for instance, have been using A.I. to give themselves mustaches to trick age-verification software into thinking they’re adults, which says a lot both about teen ingenuity and about the crappiness of the tech we’re supposed to be using to tell how old people are. It will be difficult to enforce, which Starmer acknowledged. But then we’ve accepted that despite the ease with which enterprising teenagers can find ways to buy booze, it’s sensible to have laws intended to stop them doing so.
More interesting are the ideological and sociological reasons why the ban may have unintended negative consequences. There are fears that if young people can’t manage to get on places like Instagram and TikTok, then they will turn to unregulated spaces instead. If a 12-year-old manages to get themselves a social media account, and sees content there that is upsetting or otherwise harmful, they may feel that they can’t talk to their parents about it because they’ve been doing something that isn’t allowed. There are those who argue that suddenly allowing young people access to social media at 16 might be overwhelming, with its own associated harms, like going from a dark room to full sunlight. It’s all tied up with wider concerns about how top-down governmental controls over internet access will affect adults too. Handing over power to restrict who sees what content online to governments is a dangerous precedent. Not to mention the legitimate worries about data breaches if, for instance, passports are required to be uploaded to verify age.
It’s also true that kids simply enjoy finding things of innocent interest to them on social media. According to the Status of Girls’ Rights…
Read the full article at Slate →
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