Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c77yx1jpg1nt

by petepete • 1 month ago

69 117 1 month ago

bbc.co.uk

petepete• 1 month ago

The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.
"We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban."

YouTube is a bit of a surprise here, but I guess with Shorts they put themselves in the same category as Tiktok, etc.

veltas3• 1 month ago

There is this weird attempt to claim YouTube isn't social media from Google and others, but it's literally called "You Tube". It was designed as social media from the start, it's impossible to separate this without changing the name and everything about how it works except the films and series available to pay for.

ben_w3• 1 month ago

I guess for me, when the term "social media" was coined, it was about friends, while YouTube was already more parasocial and more like short segments on broadcast TV (with at that time a comment section that seemed to promote nothing worth reading).

Things move on after perceptions have crystalised.

Gigachad5• 1 month ago

My problem with youtube is they mix everything in the same bucket. Kids watching educational content on the platform is obviously fine, but watching shorts for 3 hours isn't. Or worse, uploading shorts of their own.

They need to break shorts off in to it's own app and create a kids mode account that disables commenting and uploading.

gwd• 1 month ago

It's called "YouTube" because if you want to, you can be your own broadcaster. Calling YouTube "social media" because anyone can contribute (although the vast, vast majority are just consumers) is like calling Fiver or Upwork or DoorDash or Uber "social media", because anyone can join and contribute.

basisword6• 1 month ago

I think YouTube is one of the more critical ones to ban. Yes it has educational content but it’s also full of absolute brain rot. I’ve seen a lot of “but how will people study for exams” arguments - the answer is the same way they always have. Books. Test scores aren’t exactly going up so the idea that YouTube is critical to school learning is nonsense.

IshKebab2• 1 month ago

Yeah I don't think they've thought that through. YouTube hosts a mountain of educational content, e.g. the Khan Academy. That's now banned in the UK for under 16s.

SiempreViernes5• 1 month ago

There is also educational content on other sites

basisword6• 1 month ago

It clearly hasn’t resulted in better educated children so doesn’t seem like a big loss. We have good free education with everything provided already. The idea that YouTube is required is silly.

thomc• 1 month ago

YouTube allows parents to turn off shorts for their kids (if their kids are part of their family account). Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to turn off shorts for oneself without resorting to browser extensions.

win2k4• 1 month ago

I wonder if a ban on YouTube means a ban on kids watching YouTube or just having an account.

If it's the former, then many schools use YouTube for educational purposes and set their kids homework that involves watching it. My old school sent us YouTube videos to watch on WW2 during the lockdown.

If it's the latter, what happens when YouTube flags your IP as suspicious and demands you "sign in to confirm you're not a bot"?

matthewsharpe3• 1 month ago

For any Australians who are already living with this, how's it going over there? Would you say the policy has been a success or not?

jemmyw• 1 month ago

I did read a story about a mother and teen influencer who was moving to the UK because of the ban. I wonder how they're feeling.

baal80spam2• 1 month ago

Next stop: Canada!

defrost• 1 month ago

It's been very good for encouraging teens to learn more about networking and using AI tools to fake IDs etc.

It's not yet reached threshold levels that would actually likely see teen usage drop dramatically:

  A separate piece of research found that teens thought at least two-thirds of other teens would need to be off social media for them to give it up, too. [2]

[1] March 2026: It’s official: Australia’s teen social media ban isn’t working, yet. https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/31/australias-teen-social-...

[2] May 2026: Australia is fixing its teen social media ban on the fly. Do the changes go far enough? https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/05/01/teen-social-media-ban-a...

All in all, still in flux, things are being tweaked, too early to tell.

I am in favour of throwing challenges in front of teenagers though .. but I'm a grandparent - it's what I do.

Gigachad5• 1 month ago

I feel like this was all part of the plan, put the laws in knowing the weak tech will be bypassed, and then slowly improve the tech to the point it's too much of a pain to bypass and most teens just don't bother and instead use platforms they can still access like IMs/group chats rather than instagram.

bigfatkitten• 1 month ago

My 15 year old daughter and her friends, ranging in age from 14 to 16 have more or less been unaffected.

One of her 14 year old friends was locked out of Snapchat for about 10 minutes, until she had another 15 year old friend pass the age verification on her behalf.

NewLogic• 1 month ago

Worse than useless as it creates precedence to ID everyone online while materially having no impact on U16s relationship with technology.

nhinck2• 1 month ago

I dont have a heap of colleagues with kids in the targeted age range (11-16) but those that do said their kids got around it quickly.

sashank_1509• 1 month ago

Can this be realistically enforced without parents help?

designerarvid8• 1 month ago

Conveniently, this will force the government to authenticate all users of social media to ensure they are over 16.

ben_w3• 1 month ago

From the polling I've seen, a majority (90%!) of parents are amongst those who called for this ban: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/britain-expec...

This means much more support for the ban by parents than by non-parents, as the full population average is about 75% support.

win2k4• 1 month ago

I wish those parents would just setup controls on their kids' smartphones and block social media apps for them instead of forcing everyone else to give their ID.

piker4• 1 month ago

It’s a failure of capitalism that one of the greatest educational resources in four generations (YouTube) gets walled off to those who need it most. I’d say shame on Google for letting shorts ruin this for the kids, or shame on the UK government for short-sightedness, but it’s pretty easy to see where both are coming from.

cultofmetatron• 1 month ago

my my nieces are always "how do you know so much"

I then show them my playlist on youtube (veretassium, tomscott, redvsblue, pbs eons etc)

they go back to scrolling though shorts right after.

you can lead a horse to water but well...

SiempreViernes5• 1 month ago

Yes, but for the simile to work the horse has to be hooked on a special horse-feed lined with cocaine or something.

Admittedly children have ignored well meaning adults trying to educate them for all of history...

thefz• 1 month ago

one of the greatest educational resources in four generations (YouTube)

Depends. I struggle to follow video content, and do better with text. YMMV.

vkazanov• 1 month ago

It is super easy to see where this is coming from with youtube.

Speaking from experience: there is just no usable way to limit youtube to certain types of content, or disable "discovery" UI. Recommendation engine gravity is just too strong. Whatever useful kid/educational content they have is swamped by the ocean of attention sinks.

Shorts only made this worse.

aa-jv• 1 month ago

Its more of a failure of OS vendors to provide tools for parents to properly raise their children in the digital age.

OS vendors, which are now more interested in selling ad space, than actually developing operating systems - and thus have a vested interest in separating my childs' eyeballs from my agency and responsibility as a parent.

If there were a way for me, in a default out of box OS install, to observe my kids screens, safely and securely in the context of a family unit - the same way I look under their beds for stray socks, and sort their bookshelf, and so on - then there would be less of an issue for "Daddy Internet" to be raising my kids for me, as either bullies or victims.

But in the Western world there is a very strong inclination to separate children from their parents, and abrogate the parents' rights and responsibilities with regards to raising their children - and this totalitarian-authoritarian action from the UK and Australian governments, which are both wholesale rights-abusing entities - is just more of the same.

OS vendors could solve the problem for social networking - give me better tools to administer my childs' computers, and return my agency as a parent that has for the last few decades been utterly deteriorated by the OS vendors' desire to sell more ads.

I would wager that anyone who thinks its a good idea for 'banning' to be the hammer for this nail, probably also thinks that the family unit also needs to be disbanded, for greater social control outside the family home ...

azan_• 1 month ago

How is it failure of capitalism?

piker4• 1 month ago

The product was born of and shaped entirely by capitalism? I say this as very much a capitalist.

logicchains2• 1 month ago

It’s a failure of capitalism that one of the greatest educational resources in four generations (YouTube) gets walled off to those who need it most.

Without capitalism that resource wouldn't even exist.

rightbyte• 1 month ago

Yes that is another drawback.

designerarvid8• 1 month ago

Honest question: Is this about anything else than forcing all citizens to ID themselves to the government before using digital services?

designerarvid8• 1 month ago

Here's a random movie recommendation that has nothing at all to do with the above comment or the original link posted: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094

dyauspitr• 1 month ago

Who cares, it’s just the internet.

basisword6• 1 month ago

Have they said you’ll need to provide ID? My guess would be they do it through other mechanisms like age estimation. I know X is already doing this for posts labelled mature. If they do estimation through account age most people are probably already basically verified on lots of the main social media services.

designerarvid8• 1 month ago

I don't know, hence the question.

crimsoneer• 1 month ago

This specifically doesn't ID anybody. It's not using the upcoming digital ID, it's just going to use the existing age authentication - eg, you just need to show your company is doing some sort of "serious" age verification (not just enter your DOB here) rather than actually checking identity.

It's bad, shallow populism, but it's not some nefarious surveillance plan, as much as the yanks are going to paint it that way.

designerarvid8• 1 month ago

Not painting it any way, just asking. I'm in the EU btw, we're likely heading in the same direction from what it seems.

XorNot2• 1 month ago

Its wildly popular to the tune of 70% support amongst the general population?

The HN bubble needs to realize that it's not that people don't care, it's that they really want this and also when it didn't work started complaining they wanted even more.

designerarvid8• 1 month ago

Agreed, surely politicians are good at aligning to what's popular.

A certain type of people thrived in 1970's East Germany too, saying to themselves that it was for the greater good.

moebrowne• 1 month ago

source?

sn0wleppard• 1 month ago

Is that stat from the consultation in which opposing it wasn't even an option?

https://xcancel.com/BigBrotherWatch/status/20338777100076117...

SiempreViernes5• 1 month ago

Yes, it's about the explicitly stated goal of getting kids to stop being harmed by the products of some of the largest advertising agencies on the planet that have resisted more subtle regulation for decades.

piker4• 1 month ago

Yes, no doubt there is an obvious first-order reason for this. It's the second order effects that I think folks are rightly worried about, but it's easy to steel man.

dagss• 1 month ago

As a Norwegian teen parent: Seeing all the issues cropping up which is /enabled/ (not saying caused) by social media, you don't need to look for ulterior motives. I believe these bans are honest attempts to fix real problems.

Examples I know about include 12-year-olds selling nudes, teen experimentation with alcohol being replaced with cocaine because cocaine is so easily available (the issue is the scale and how widespread cocaine is getting; not that it never happened before), several cases in Norway of 13-year-olds being recruited by the mafia to throw bombs at houses through the internet, violence etc. is up the roof, kids have 4 hours of sleep since they doomscroll all through the night, results in school are trending downwards, university reports that students are increasingly unable to concentrate...

Are there other solutions than bans to social media? Sure. Could this in theory have been fixed by better parenting? Sure.

But parents don't live in a vacuum. Parents and children alike rely on the culture around them.

Social media is a HUGE shift to society, and neither culture nor parenting practices has sufficiently adopted to handle it yet. Slowing the shift down a bit until norms and culture catches up doesn't seem like a bad idea.

designerarvid8• 1 month ago

Good point. Future historians looking back will likely consider 2015/2016 to be the point when we entered the social-media-epoch. Both Brexit and Trump where mainly social-media-driven phenomenon.

283042834092344• 1 month ago

I cannot upvoter you enough. I'm a parent of teens as well. To those in doubt: Talk to some teachers of 8 to 18 year old kids/young adults.

jackdoe• 1 month ago

Social media is a HUGE shift to society

Our teens are living through a changing time: peak unregulated social media, that I personally belive is approaching heroin level addiction and damage; covid lockdowns testing the very limits of Piagetian theory; AI in school and outsourcing understanding; very uncertain job market to enter into; possibly the collapse of AMOC; reaching Peloponnesian war level of unstable democracy; the true collapse of idealism, the birth of the mechanical man and the first total spiritual crisis

Our institutions absolutely can not react with the accelerated change, so I think the only thing a parent can do is act as individuals, teach their children, and position their families in the best way they can to weather the storm.

AI romantic partners are coming.

DrScientist2• 1 month ago

The question isn't whether there are harms - the questions is whether the approach - a ban based on age, and therefore some sort of ID, has a hidden agenda.

After all many of those harms you listed don't suddenly stop at 16.

Many campaigners see this approach as letting the tech companies off the hook - by removing children from the platforms is removes a key leverage point to get the tech companies to cleanup their act generally.

Obviously it's quite possible the not-so-hidden agenda is simply a political one of 'being seen to do something'.

I see that youtube is on the blanket banned list - which is a bit surprising given they are probably one of the more responsible platforms and it also contains lots of educational stuff.

snehk2• 1 month ago

I wonder why Poland doesn't have these problems even though everyone uses social media including teens.

ascorbic2• 1 month ago

The UK government has no problem being openly authoritarian when it wants to, without hiding it behind other policies. Whether or not you think it's bad policy (I think it's mixed), I think this is genuinely about what it claims to be.

win2k4• 1 month ago

The truth is the vast majority of British citizens (70%+) support this. Actually, support for the Online Safety Act went up in the year after it was implemented. People you talk to online are not representative of public opinion as a whole. British society is very pro-"protecting children", which is what this is advertised as.

A lot of old people think a social media ban will bring back the good old days of their childhood where kids went outside. A lot of parents don't want to tell their kids "no" to social media because of "peer pressure", instead of just telling their kids to find better friends.

Only a small proportion of the population recognises this is about control. No major political party will speak out against this as they know being against it is a vote loser.

christoph• 1 month ago

The currency of the world is data. This the beginning of public restriction to data (currency). It always starts slowly. Start with kids, softly softly. Fast forward a couple of years and we absolutely know this will morph into total control of who has access to what, when and how. It will be used to curb whatever the ruling elite decide they don’t like and we probably won’t even know, as by then they will have full spectrum dominance of all media & comms.

Look at how they flipped the switch on Mythos last week - do peope really believe these lunatic governments we’re all currently suffering from won’t go further after they start this? Some of you seem to think they still “ask” nicely... nope, they just do whatever they want now.

logicchains2• 1 month ago

It's also about an extremely unpopular government restricting teenagers to only information provided by government controlled/supporting sources, so when they turn 16 and can vote they're more likely to vote for the incumbent regime.

scotty79• 1 month ago

Probably? Social media has a ton of negative influence on young people. One of which is reducing time spent on in-person socializing which leads to decrease in number of romantic relationships and children born.

This is something government deeply cares about because the business that bought it needs there to be more workers so that the labor remains dirt cheap.

NorwegianDude• 1 month ago

The proper way to implement it is to issue digital IDs and use ZK proofs to verify the age. That way the service doesn't know anything other that the fact that you have an official digital ID and that you are at least a certain age. The ID issuer does not need to be involved in anything other than issuing the ID, making it perfect when it comes to privacy, while still fulfilling the goal of having an age limit.

If this is built on open standards, so that anyone can use it for free, it would be a big positive step forward for everyone.

mrob3• 1 month ago

Zero knowledge proofs are unusable for age verification because they're impossible to revoke. One person can share their ID and everyone else can use it.

H4cks0r13372• 1 month ago

No. Simple as. Savvy teenagers will just go to darker corners of the internet.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 1 month ago

But there are many many not savvy teenagers that won't do that. So at least this may help them, until they turn 16.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm• 1 month ago

You realise they don't need to ban under 16s to come up with an excuse to force online ID checks? This conspiracy theory needs to end.

basisword6• 1 month ago

Curious how this effects those weird family vloggers. It would be great if the ban also includes filming your children for your own content or building profiles you manage on their behalf.

CommanderData• 1 month ago

Comes after certain ethnostates have the LOWEST popularity among young populations, and I'm certain this will help change that.

The Iran war was won online and it's been widely reported the young amoung the military had extreme low levels of morale which had an impact on the battlefield.

Social media is national security threat to our governments and colonialism needs it's foot soldiers.

sndgndgndgndy• 1 month ago

Ah yes, Jeffrey Epstein was a, uh, "Colonialist". Working for the Colonialists to blackmail US celebrities and politicians. In the name of Colonialism.

jan_nan• 1 month ago

Very strong opinions about this. As someone who grew up on the internet and who prefers to browse it read-only without an account, with self-deleting cookies, ideally using some of the amazing third party front-ends out there for the likes of YouTube and co, this announcement is a bit of a "fuck you" to my way of life. Obviously a VPN will go some way to navigating the immediate effects of this but I worry for the larger eddies this might create towards a broader acceptance among platforms of enforced user identification and verification.

Also, YouTube is one of _the_ premier platforms for education. Many schools use it directly, and I'm sure every kid today with an itch to learn has found a serious part of their identity through the educational YouTube channels out there that IMO do such a better job than equivelent media a generation ago did.

basisword6• 1 month ago

I wonder if this will lead to services improving moderation to get themselves unbanned? They’ve been moaning for years that they do their best when we know they don’t. Maybe YouTube will get much stricter on content in the hope they can get some sort of under-16 product approved?

epolanski• 1 month ago

I'm very conflicted when it comes to these bans.

1. On one side I understand the spirit, but the demographic that is most victim of socials in my experience are 50 yo+. At family dinners, etc, it's them, not the kids, being unable to not be perma distracted by the phone. Even when they are not distracted they consistently need to take photos or show you something on their phone or start face calling somebody.

2. This unavoidably spreads the requirement for ID verification to the whole population, not just kids de facto further advancing government's control of communications.

3. Social medias should've been regulated at the algorithm level. Or, like in South Korea, they could've implemented hard coded daily time limits of usage of the applications.

4. Youngsters will just migrate to platforms that don't fall under the ban making the enforcement.

5. Bans achieve little but further increase the appeal for these platforms. Instead of investing in education for the youth such as longer school days with more sports or cultural activities the government chooses limitations and provides the wrong incentives.

gorgoiler• 1 month ago

The press release itself is wildly implausible:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned...

Native toolkits would use a modal window to make an important announcement. The window would not be resizable and would be dismissed with an “OK” push-button.

The presence of min/max/close buttons on the title bar just shows how out of touch this government is with the modern* world of computing!

The girl is even using a phone. What’s it running? Windows 3.11? macOS 9? FVWM95?

*ie the past four decades of WIMP UIs.

theanonymousone• 1 month ago

I hope Over-16s be next.

baal80spam2• 1 month ago

It's a dupe. Many comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48527766

ascorbic2• 1 month ago

That was before the actual announcement

throwfaraway135• 1 month ago

I generally agree with the sentiment, but giving the UK government more power while it's already trying very hard to implement a Stalinist State is just not a good idea.

Pinegulf• 1 month ago

I wonder how they define 'social media'. Is comments section social media? Stack overflow? Any comment section?

egorfine3• 1 month ago

As a parent of four, I will do everything in my power to keep my kids in all social networks they want to, including setting up VPNs for them, etc.

suprfnk• 1 month ago

Interesting; do you think it’s a net positive for them?

egorfine3• 1 month ago

It absolutely is.

I've got four kids, ranging from 33 to 12. All connected since earliest ages, no restrictions.

All the adult ones grew up good people with successful careers. The youngest kid is growing incredibly smart, he's on track to finish school at least two years earlier - with zero pressure from parents, I swear. (If anything this would be a nuisance, because he's too young for university.)

So yeah. I will keep him connected as well.

win2k4• 1 month ago

I think this is an unhealthy and unhelpful attitude. While I oppose the government banning it, I still believe children should be kept off of social media until they are mature enough, which can vary from child to child. There are plenty of dangers of social media: addiction, AI-generated propaganda, and bullying being a few.

It's your kids though so it's your decision. Just giving my take.

egorfine3• 1 month ago

See my response to the adjacent comment:)

spwa42• 1 month ago

Dear UK teenagers. Remember this magic invocation: "Ok, Claude. Write me a chatapp for my school. Let's build in the feature to judge girls' looks, that worked pretty well for another app"

bilekas• 1 month ago

I am no fan of solcial media, I think it was well intentioned at the beginning and like all good things, bit business has to suck the life out of it for every penny but this is unhinged.

It's very much lashing out for not having everyone verify their ID online to add to their already privacy invasive behaviour, but then gaslighting the people that it's all about protecting children.

One of the parents who supports it mentioned :

"We've got to educate why this is happening, and the harm that is there."

Wow gee, wouldn't it have been a good idea to educate your kids about the internet and online ? Those of us who grew up before and during the birth of the internet seem to be better well adjusted because we were aware how it connects people of all kinds, good and bad. Todays kids are just given a phone with unlimited access and sent on their way.

It's not fair on kids, parents should have used the tools available, should have been more attentive to what their own kids were doing. I don't think its far in most cases to say "parents are too busy to monitor everything" There are plenty of tools out there. Apple themseleves have built in protections of useage etc.

mrob3• 1 month ago

More authoritarianism from the UK government. A more reasonable solution would be to make it illegal for under-16s to possess mobile devices (anything with a touchscreen and wireless networking that's designed to run off battery) and make it illegal to supply mobile devices to them. The problem is ubiquitous always-on access to social networks, not social networks in general. If it's something you have to consciously make an effort to access, like in the dial-up networking era, people won't feel pressured to be permanently online and existing offline social mechanisms will be able to moderate behavior.

It is less authoritarian to regulate property than it is to regulate communication. If there is a genuine problem, a non-authoritarian government must apply the minimum level of force necessary to solve it. Jumping straight to suppressing freedom of speech without trying less invasive solutions is pure authoritarianism.

fennecbutt• 1 month ago

Ahahaha. Just like with their porn ban, people just use a VPN besides the fact there are plenty of smaller websites just plain not adhering to the stupid laws.

Starmer is an idiot, in every photo of him at some political event etc he always looks like a lost schoolboy with an expression on his face of having walked into a room full of adults and now he's afraid to move lest he be noticed by the big bois.

Granted, all of the other political parties in the UK are inept, corrupt, hapless, ignorant, etc. Reform are a bunch of racists who'll sooner give tax breaks to corporations than actually help the people. Tories are a shadow of their former selves and probably still have delusions that the Rwanda deal was a good idea and not a ludicrous fantasy that should have been an onion article instead of reality. Libdems don't really DO anything, no strong policies and to wont to "go with the flow". Greens are like greens in every country, 90% of their policies make sense, the other 10% are batshit but they're all social environment related and that's a small percentage of required policy - they'd be too afraid to use economic controls.

But the real problem, like everywhere in the world, is the voterbase. Apathetic, sugar/salt/dopamine loving human animals. Can't blame em (us) really, but still - why are we prepared to act all civilised etc when in reality a good chunk of people don't really have any idea what's going on, don't care what's going on and would rather scroll tiktok while eating fastfood and hating whatever group their "tribe" has chosen to hate whilst misplacing their vote while the billionaires become trillionaires.

We (humans worldwide) are falling far below the replacement rate. Global temperatures are still rising. People are still starving even when we have the technology and capital to feed them all.

pyb• 1 month ago

"Social media" is such a wide and vague term. We're basically banning people from talking to each other.

Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces

Related Stories