UK's Social Media Ban for Teens: A Controversial Approach to Safety

London, United Kingdom Jul 18, 2026 ALN: AS the world darkens, we chase our kids into the night.

The latest step on the UK path to a social media ban is a midnight curfew, including 16 and 17-year-olds. The “addictive” combination of autoplay and infinite scroll have also been targeted.

And to come, around Christmas, is the full list of banned-for-under-16s apps and services – "whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material,” in the UK Government’s words. That’s probably going to include YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and maybe also game platforms like Roblox and Minecraft.

There’s a teeming ant-hill of arguments for and against these measures, which we’ll get into (and on which I take a position). But maybe a good start is to whizz to Australia, where a social media ban for kids and teens has been in place since December 2025, and see how it’s going.

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In terms of the chiefly desired effect (which is keeping them off the devices): not brilliantly. A study published in The BMJ last month reported that out of 12 to 17-year-olds, 85% of under-16s were still using social media three months after the ban took effect.

Polling from the Molly Rose Foundation in March 2026 revealed that 61% of 12 to 15-year-olds who previously had the banned accounts still maintained access to one or more. More than half of previous users of TikTok (53%), YouTube (53%), and Instagram (52%) remained active on those platforms.

The burden of enforcement has been put at the tech-corps’ feet. But circumvention hasn’t proved difficult: 70% of children still using restricted sites reported that it was “easy” to bypass the ban. In most cases, platforms simply failed to take action to remove or deactivate pre-existing accounts. The Australian government is already investigating the social media companies and has boosted their fines to A$99 million.

(Image: Unsplash)

Commenting on the Australian experience so far, a UK Government spokesperson said: “Our approach goes further than the Australia model and will be underpinned by stronger, more effective age verification checks to make it far harder for children to get round safeguards. This ban is as much about helping future generations, and resetting social norms in future, as it is about young people today.”

Well, at least that makes it explicit. This is being cast as strong, visionary government acting to protect the people against corporate power – and their own behaviours and tendencies.

The case made by Jonathan Haidt and others – that a rise in mental-health problems among kids and teens is coterminous with, and caused by, the rise of social media – has been persuasive across the world. And across regimes both democratic and authoritarian.

Yet something doesn’t feel right about it, as if it’s too blunt an instrument. Kids’ tech expert Candice Odgers suggests, for example, that if we wanted to reduce the sexploitation of children online, based on the nature of the perpetrators, we should ban all adult males from the internet. Which we wouldn’t do…would we?

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Odgers leads a charge of social scientists who contest Haidt’s claims that social media has primarily caused the youth mental health crisis.

There are other, more probable drivers of adolescent distress to consider, she suggests. The 2008 recession; the rising crisis in adult mental health and the effects of adult opioid addiction; the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing solely on social media “sucks all the air out of the room”, says Odgers, preventing us from addressing the real reasons behind the slump in mental health.

Perhaps most damning is the critique from one of Haidt’s erstwhile collaborators, the child psychologist Peter Gray. In 2017, Haidt and Gray had founded Let Grow, a US organisation committed to promoting unsupervised (or minimally so) child-play in communities.

Both of them agreed that such free experiences are the best and healthiest foundations of a strong, balanced adult character.

But they increasingly disagreed on the role of digital culture in that playfulness. “To grow up well, children have to be able to play in the world that they’re growing up in”, said Gray to The Atlantic – which includes the internet and social media.

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His reaction to Haidt’s claims – now a forthcoming book – are stern. “As a society, we have almost a knee-jerk reaction to believe that the solution to any problem experienced by kids is to deprive them of yet one more freedom, and this book is helping to jerk some of those knees even further.”

So Haidt’s own collaborator thinks the causal story is wrong. What’s Gray’s own explanation for the worsening in kids’ mental health? He has a chastening answer.

Both in the US and internationally, from early 2010 onwards, he blames the introduction of an increasingly standardised testing culture (both preparing for and sitting them). And a narrowing of the curricula to serve those tests.

In the US, this was titled Common Core. According to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America study, 43% of US teens cited school performance as a primary stressor in 2009 (pre-Common Core). By 2013 (post-Common Core), that number had jumped to 83%.

Gray cites more recent data (2024) from Pew Research showing that 68% of teens feel significant pressure to get good grades – a figure that far exceeds the pressure they feel to “fit in” or look good socially.

He further notes (from his US context) that youth suicides are far more common during the school year than during holidays or summer breaks. This suggests that the school environment itself is a major driver of extreme distress.

It’s a blizzard of research statistics out there. And you would prefer that policy decisions about our children’s travails were made in a multifactorial way.

I wouldn’t deny that one driver of youth distress is the exploitative intents of digital corporations – the “captology” they consciously practice upon younger generations. Like the oil or cigarette companies before them, the “smoking memos” of awareness and culpability for knowingly perpetrated harms exist (take Meta’s own research on teen harm).

But one deep-seated cause has to be the way that adults and their political decisions have robbed kids and youth of their hopes for the future. We totter towards an environmental and techno-economic precipice. To me, it feels wrong to be depriving the generation inheriting this mess of some of the tools they need to address it.

An advanced citizenship is required – and social media/digital culture could provide the content that motivates, the systems that organise, the forums that deliberate, the news that triggers action. But only if we – and our younger and betters – embrace its possibilities.

How about “strong state action” that provides an incentive to make apps that serve the civic good? That develop the citizens required for our demanding future?

Banning access to vicious software evades the challenge of building and encouraging virtuous software.

We have another coming wave of technofear with AI – whose inhuman force interestingly brings the human relationships at the heart of social media into sharp relief. Surveys are beginning to show a youth pushback against the simulations (or “slop” and “fakes”) of AI.

But there’s a perversity here. Just when young, formative humans need to find each other, in order to start building a better world, their toolbox is half-emptied, warped and constrained.

The relations between freedom and safety are not zero-sum, victory or defeat for one side or the other. Can we keep thinking about this, please?