The UK government has launched a consultation on introducing an Australian-style ban on social media for under-16s. The proposal is framed as a bold response to rising concerns about young people’s mental health, online abuse and exposure to harmful content.
At first glance, a ban sounds straightforward: keep children away from platforms that can cause harm. But as someone who has spent years researching young people’s digital lives, relationships and wellbeing, I believe that a blanket ban risks misunderstanding both the problem and the solution.
My research with teenagers consistently shows that the harms young people experience online [are not separate]…
The UK government has launched a consultation on introducing an Australian-style ban on social media for under-16s. The proposal is framed as a bold response to rising concerns about young people’s mental health, online abuse and exposure to harmful content.
At first glance, a ban sounds straightforward: keep children away from platforms that can cause harm. But as someone who has spent years researching young people’s digital lives, relationships and wellbeing, I believe that a blanket ban risks misunderstanding both the problem and the solution.
My research with teenagers consistently shows that the harms young people experience online are not separate from the harms they face offline. Bullying, racism, sexism, coercion, exclusion and body image pressures all pre-date social media. Digital platforms can amplify these problems, but they do not create them from scratch.
In focus groups I conducted with teenagers and research I carried out with young people during the pandemic, participants described online life as an extension of school corridors, peer groups and local communities. This is what scholars increasingly call a “post-digital” reality. Young people do not experience online and offline as separate worlds, but as a single, interconnected continuum.
If harms are socially rooted, then technical restrictions alone are unlikely to solve them. A ban treats social media as the problem, rather than asking deeper questions about why certain behaviours – harassment, shaming, misogyny, exploitation – occur in the first place.
We also need to ask why digital spaces have become the default arenas for meeting so many needs in the first place. Over years of funding cuts to youth services, reduced community spaces and intensified academic pressures, online platforms have filled a gap.
They did not simply colonise young people’s lives. They were invited into a vacuum created by adult policy decisions. A ban addresses the symptom of these developments while leaving the wider contexts untouched.
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There is also a practical problem. Age-based bans are difficult to enforce. Young people are resourceful digital citizens. Many will find workarounds, migrate to unregulated platforms or simply lie about their age.
This risks driving online activity underground, away from any oversight of parents, teachers and support services. Instead of engaging with young people where they already are, a ban could make it harder to identify those who are struggling and need help.
A recent joint statement signed by more than 40 children’s charities, digital safety experts and bereaved families warns of the danger that blanket prohibitions may isolate vulnerable young people from peer support networks and crisis resources.
What young people say they need
Many young people are critical of social media. In my research on online harms and influencer culture, young people frequently describe feeling exhausted by comparison culture, constant notifications and the pressure to be “always on”. They often say they want more time offline and more meaningful face-to-face connection.
Teens want more authentic experiences and to be able to talk to adults about social media. SeventyFour/Shutterstock
This ambivalence shows that young people are not passive victims of technology but can identify problems and articulate the kind of digital lives they want. They ask for better education, more honest conversations and greater adult understanding.
They want to learn how to set boundaries, recognise coercion and algorithmic manipulation, and manage conflict. Above all, they want to be taken seriously as partners in solving the problems they face.
A blanket ban treats young people as a single homogeneous group, ignoring the diversity of their experiences, needs and circumstances. It assumes that what is protective for one young person will be protective for all, rather than recognising that risks and benefits are shaped by identity, relationships, resources and context.
What parents are really worried about
Parents’ perspectives add another important layer. In research colleagues and I have carried out with families, many parents express deep ambivalence about social media. They worry about online harms and often voice a nostalgic desire to return to a pre-internet era of childhood.
Yet this nostalgia is rarely about technology alone. It is more often an expression of feeling out of control as parents, in the face of powerful tech companies, complex digital cultures and broader social changes they perceive to be reshaping their children’s lives.
Parents describe feeling torn between wanting to protect their children, while recognising that digital communication is central to modern friendship and learning. They fear both the risks of their children being online and the risks of exclusion from being offline.
In this context, a ban can feel like an attractive proposition. It promises to restore a sense of order and authority. But it risks misdiagnosing the problem. What parents are asking for is not simply prohibition but more support to navigate these tensions, including clearer regulation of platforms, better education in schools and more resources to help families manage digital life together.
The illusion of simple fixes
The appeal of a ban lies in its simplicity. But complex social problems rarely yield to simple technological solutions.
Real progress will be slower and less headline-grabbing. It involves investing in high-quality relationships and sex education that reflects young people’s digital realities, and supporting parents to have informed conversations. It means regulating platform design to reduce exploitation and harassment, and holding social media companies more accountable. And it requires rebuilding the offline services and spaces that give young people genuine alternatives.
Social media is not an external danger that young people occasionally visit. It is woven into their everyday social worlds. By cutting young people off from the spaces through which they meet real personal, interpersonal and social needs, a ban risks leaving them unmoored.
A generation growing up in a networked world needs guidance, not exclusion from the spaces where their lives unfold. Policy must start from how young people actually live, not from adult fears about technology. If we want young people to be safer online, the answer is not to ban their digital lives, but to help them navigate them.