The UK will ban social media for kids under 16

On June 15, Keir Starmer said the UK is going to stop kids under 16 from using social media. As an announcement, it sounds like exactly the kind of decisive action a lot of us have been waiting for. In practice, what the government is actually attempting is one of the hardest needles to thread in tech policy, and I say that as someone who has spent years building technology for children and watching well-intentioned fixes miss the target. So here’s what was announced, what nobody has worked out yet and what you can do at home in the meantime.

The plan is to bar anyone under 16 from holding accounts on the big platforms. The government named Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal are out of scope, and so is YouTube Kids. The government also wants to block under-16s from livestreaming, stop strangers from contacting children on gaming and livestreaming services and require AI “romantic companion” chatbots to verify users are 18 or older. It came out of a national consultation that nine in ten parents backed.

The first regulations are expected to reach Parliament before Christmas, with the rules coming into force in spring 2027, but the distance between the press conference and a working law is enormous. We know enforcement is meant to land on platforms, not on kids or parents, and that families won’t be penalised if a child finds a way around the rules. What we don’t know is how the age checks will actually function, which is sort of the whole question. And nobody has explained how it deals with the workarounds like VPNs and borrowed logins.

Australia is the cautionary tale here. Three months into its own under-16 ban, the country’s online safety regulator found that roughly 70% of kids who already had accounts still had access to at least one major platform, and in most cases they hadn’t even needed a workaround, because the platforms simply hadn’t identified and removed their accounts in the first place.

The experts are split, and what struck me is that both camps want the same outcome. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children welcomed the ambition while warning the age checks have to actually work. The skeptics, for their part, have no love for the platforms. Their worry is whether this particular method does anything. The UN human rights office cautioned that bans are easy to get around and risk pushing kids toward less monitored, riskier corners of the internet, and legal specialists noted that once the rules stretch into livestreaming and chatbots, the whole thing gets much harder to police.

Read across those critics and they keep landing in the same place, and it happens to be the argument I agree with. Whether kids can reach these platforms was never the heart of it. What matters is how the platforms behave once anyone, child or adult, is on them. The UN has called for safety to be designed into the architecture from the start instead of leaving parents to manage the fallout, and UNICEF put it plainly that age limits are no substitute for companies fixing their design and moderation. Raising the age on the front door doesn’t make the room behind it safe. A wall is something a determined kid climbs, usually into worse territory. The slower, harder work is changing what’s actually in the room, and that’s the work that holds up.

Which brings me to the part you can do something about today. No regulation will ever protect your kid the way you can. Children who feel they can talk to a parent about their online life make safer choices, ban or no ban. So aim for a kid who comes to you when something online scares them, rather than one who hides it because he’s afraid you’ll take the phone away. Beyond that, get specific about what your kids are actually using and why, because a group chat with their closer friends and a two-hour doomscroll are not the same thing even though they happen on the same device. Some products are engineered to keep kids on the app as long as possible. Others are built to connect them with people who love them, inside boundaries you can see, no strangers, no endless feed, nothing optimising for outrage. Those choices already exist, and you don’t need an act of Parliament to make them.

The announcement does signal that governments may finally be done treating children as an afterthought in how these products get built, and I’m glad for that. But a law arriving in 2027 won’t raise your kid in 2026. That job was always ours, and it comes down to staying close, paying attention and choosing the technology in your home on purpose.

Here are a few helpful resources in case you want to really dig into today’s topic:

• One outspoken critic of the ban is the Molly Rose Foundation, a British nonprofit that raises awareness about the harms that social media can pose to young people. In response to Keir Starmer’s announcement, they said, “a social media ban will fail to tackle fundamental product safety risks issues and leaves parents with a false sense of safety. A majority of children will continue to use high risk sites that will have no incentive to implement robust protections.”

• Another group that has mixed feelings about the social media ban? Teenagers. The BBC spoke to young influencers who shared some of the ways that social media had improved their lives, whether that was through income, connection or creativity. While they certainly saw the drawbacks, they maintained that the platforms had been a net positive in their lives.

Too long; didn’t read. It shouldn’t be a full-time job to keep up on industry news, so here is a mercifully quick summary of some other notable developments:

• The big AI platforms all have some sort of guardrails built in. In theory, these prevent the bots from sharing anything violent, illegal or sexually explicit. These guardrails are meant to keep users safe, but they’re easier to circumvent than you might think. According to the Washington Post, simple things like asking the bot to pretend to be a rule-breaking character, using poetry or hand-writing instructions and then snapping a photo will work.

• Apple recently announced new child safety features for iOS under Child Accounts. They include new monitoring features like “Ask to Browse” and a feature that requires kids to get permission to browse the internet or visit specific sites. While parents always had the option to set up child accounts, these new features are an evolution of what was already on offer.

Here are a few more pieces of original writing from me and my team—just in case you’re keen for more:

• One of the biggest trends on Roblox right now is a weird one: brain rot games. If you’re confused about what that is, check out this explainer piece from my team, complete with everything you need to know.

• Summer break means a lot more free time, and it can feel even harder than usual to keep a balance with screen time. If you want to find the right balance for your kids, check out this piece about summer screen time limits.