Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced(nieuw venster) on Monday that the UK will ban children under 16 from social media platforms including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and X. Legislation is expected before Christmas, with the ban coming into force in spring 2027. Messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal are excluded.
The UK is going further than Australia — which implemented the first under-16 social media ban(nieuw venster) — in some respects: the ban will extend to livestreaming and stranger-to-child contact on gaming platforms, and the government is considering overnight curfews on social media use for under-18s. AI chatbots designed to simulate romantic relationships will be restricted to adults only.
Political support is broad. More than 90% of parents(nieuw venster) who responded to the government’s public consultation(nieuw venster) backed a minimum age of 16. Starmer framed the decision in unambiguous terms: “Tech giants had their chance and failed, but we’re stepping in to protect children.”
But the harder question — how exactly this gets enforced — is where things get complicated.
Australia’s six months offer an early lesson
The UK government says it plans to learn from Australia, which became the first country to implement an under-16 social media ban in December 2025. That experiment now has roughly six months of data behind it.
The results are not encouraging. Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety, found that 70% of under-16s in the country continue to access banned platforms(nieuw venster). Teens have been bypassing restrictions by providing false credentials during account sign-up or lying about their age — the same workarounds that existed before the ban.
Australia’s eSafety guidelines also point to VPNs as a circumvention tool and ask platforms to detect and block them. But the evidence that children are actually driving VPN use is thin. When the UK’s Online Safety Act brought in age verification requirements in 2025, VPN usage more than doubled, but Ofcom’s Online Nation report(nieuw venster) found it had fallen back significantly by November.
Research from Childnet(nieuw venster) found the surge was not attributable to children at all. In fact, the most common reason children gave for using a VPN was to stay safe online and protect their privacy
The US government’s submission(nieuw venster) to the UK consultation made the point plainly: “VPNs are a useful, lawful privacy tool — individuals globally rely on VPNs as an essential tool to protect their privacy online and access the open internet. Policies banning or treating such internet freedom and privacy tools as inherently suspect are typically associated with states that subject their people to significant censorship and human rights violations.”
Enforcement still means collecting more sensitive data
Every age-verification system, however it works, requires platforms to collect more personal data than they do today. The UK government has asked Ofcom to conduct a rapid study on what constitutes “highly effective age assurance” for verifying whether someone is over 16.
That study will likely revisit the same territory already explored in Australia: biometric facial-age estimation, live selfie verification, AI-based behavioral inference, and government-issued identity document uploads. As we noted when Australia’s ban took effect, this approach turns mainstream social platforms into identity-verified services rather than places where people can participate without handing over sensitive information.
The UK has been here before. The government spent years trying to introduce a system requiring users to prove their age to access pornography online — and the effort collapsed after repeated technical failures and the discovery that at least one verification system could be bypassed in minutes(nieuw venster). It was abandoned in 2019. When the government tried again under the Online Safety Act, the results were no more reassuring: Discord’s rollout of age verification in 2025 ended with a third-party provider compromised and 70,000 government-ID photos exposed(nieuw venster).
Who bears the cost
Critics including the Molly Rose Foundation(nieuw venster) — established in memory of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who died by suicide after viewing self-harm content online(nieuw venster) — argue the ban is too blunt an instrument. “What we’re really concerned about is that the government rushes into solutions that the evidence just doesn’t support, rather than addressing the causes of harm,” said Rowan Ferguson, the foundation’s policy manager. Kate Edwards, its head of education, put it more directly: “It does nothing to address the actual problem — the harmful algorithms, the harmful content that is existing on those platforms.”
That’s the tension at the core of age-based social media bans. The business models that make these platforms harmful — algorithmic amplification of extreme content, infinite scroll, engagement-at-all-costs design — affect adults just as much as children. A ban on under-16 access doesn’t touch those models. Even if it does remove some young people from the platforms, it doesn’t make those platforms any less toxic.
YouTube and Meta have both warned that blanket restrictions risk pushing teenagers toward unregulated alternatives with fewer safety features. That warning should be taken seriously, because evidence from Australia suggests it’s happening(nieuw venster).
What the UK ban means globally
The UK’s announcement follows similar moves in Australia, Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia, with France, Denmark, Spain, Thailand, and South Korea studying comparable approaches. Australia said the world would follow if its rollout went smoothly. The rollout has not gone smoothly — and the world appears to be following anyway.
The US has pushed back. The American Embassy in London submitted a response(nieuw venster) to the UK’s public consultation warning against regulations that “impose disproportionate compliance burdens on American companies.” Tensions between Washington and London over Silicon Valley regulation are expected to be on the agenda at the G7 summit(nieuw venster) this week.
What’s emerging is a global race to restrict children’s access to social media without a clear model for how enforcement actually works at scale. The UK government says it will learn from Australia’s experience. Whether that learning is deep enough to produce a meaningfully different outcome remains to be seen.
The real question
Protecting children online is a legitimate and urgent goal. The harms are real — predatory behavior, algorithmically amplified content promoting self-harm, eating disorders, anxiety. No serious person disputes that tech companies have failed to address these problems voluntarily.
But the mechanism matters. Age-verification systems normalize mass collection of biometric and identity data just to access services that were previously open to everyone. They shift the burden of child safety onto data infrastructure that introduces its own serious risks. And based on what Australia has shown, they may not significantly reduce teenage access to platforms at all.
The more lasting solution is to make the internet less harmful for everyone. That means addressing the business models, algorithms, and design patterns that make these platforms toxic in the first place. Children and adults both deserve better than what today’s social media offers them. A ban on under-16s doesn’t fix that. It protects platforms, not children(nieuw venster).
At Proton, we believe the answer is to minimize data collection, maximize user control, and build systems that treat privacy as a default rather than as a trade-off for access. For families navigating these questions now, our parent’s guide to keeping kids safe online is a place to start. As Britain prepares to introduce its ban, the question worth asking is whether the cure is being designed with as much care as the diagnosis.
The answer to online harm shouldn’t be an internet that requires you to prove who you are before you’re allowed in.
