June 15, 2026

QUESTION ASKED: Will Keir Starmer’s under-16 social media ban actually work?

Saying under-16s should be banned from certain tech is easy to do. Actually keeping them off it – as the Australian precedent shows, not to mention, hem hem, the situation in my own house – is a bit tougher to enforce. Online harms come in many forms, not all of them through social media, which is in any case hard exactly to define. Is WhatsApp social media? And though we can imagine some sort of passport scan or facial recognition mechanism to verify identities for the big individual sites (with all the privacy/data-harvesting issues that will raise), the mechanism for this curfew is difficult even to imagine. And what, meanwhile, of start-ups, unregulated Android apps, browser-based services and so on that will offer an even less secure environment than the horrors of Meta and TikTok and X?

Pause should certainly be given, I think, by the fact that Ian Russell, the father of a teenage girl who died by suicide after viewing self-harm content online – and who has campaigned for years to hold Big Tech to account for online harm – doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He says it makes more sense to implement existing laws than to use “sledgehammer techniques like bans.”

At present, then, we have a headline, not a policy. Until we learn exactly how it is to be implemented, how enforced and how insulated from the law of unintended consequences, it will remain no more than a headline. But I won’t be alone in thinking: what a pretty headline.

BluSky is currently a bit of Schrödinger’s app at the moment:

However, at BluSky itself, there are reports that it will be banned for under-16s in the UK:

Screenshot

In any case, as Joanna Williams of Spiked writes, “there is little evidence to suggest a social media ban will work. Research from Australia suggests that six out of 10 children aged between 12 and 15 who had accounts on now-banned platforms had maintained access to at least one of their sites of choice. This non-compliance matters, not because teens will be harmed by spending time on TikTok, but because they learn that the law is not to be complied with but to be worked around, mocked and, ultimately, ignored. So why is Keir Starmer backtracking? Partly, because it is easier to acquiesce to the panic-mongers than it is to reason with hysteria. And, like other prime ministers before him, Starmer is discovering that bans are the last resort of politicians with nothing else to offer.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 3:00 pm by Ed Driscoll