The UK's Social Media Ban Builds on A Shaky Age-Verification Foundation
The UK's under-16 social media ban threatens privacy, anonymity, and free expression for everyone — and the evidence it rests on is far weaker than the government admits.
The United Kingdom announced this week that it plans to ban certain social media sites for all children under 16 years old. Although framed as a child-protection measure, the proposal would affect far more than teenagers. By requiring intrusive age verification and limiting access to online platforms, it risks undermining privacy, anonymous speech, and freedom of expression for everyone.
The UK is following in the footsteps of Australia, which enacted a similar ban last year. Both countries are imposing the bans out of concern for the impacts of social media on children’s mental health. “Parents want to keep their kids safe and happy, but the online world has made that harder than ever,” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement announcing the policy.
The UK plans to ban children under 16 from using social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and YouTube, but it will not ban Signal, WhatsApp, and other messaging services. The government’s announcement did not sufficiently justify how a selective ban on only certain platforms would address its concerns about harms to children.
The government also plans to examine restrictions on certain social media features, such as infinite scrolling, for 16- and 17-year-olds.
The government justified its move in part on the basis of a consultation with more than 116,000 children, experts, and parents, who overwhelmingly said they want a social media ban. It’s worth noting how the government admits (on a webpage that is several clicks away from its announcement) that its consultation findings have a self-selection bias and are not representative:
“The consultation was open to anyone who chose to respond. The results reflect the views of parents and carers who were motivated to take part, and are not representative of parents and carers nationally. As with any open public consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristics.”
Regardless, the government did not explain why parents are unable to control the platforms that their children access. Nor did it articulate the strength of the data supporting its assumption that social media harms children under 16. In January, the UK government released a report authored by 14 scholars, which found a “small but consistent correlation” between adolescent social media use and poor mental health. But the report warned that “while longitudinal studies can demonstrate the sequence of events, they cannot confirm causality without the use of more robust causal methods.”
This is in line with research around the world, which is equivocal at best on the issue of whether social media harms teenage mental health. A 2024 report by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that its “review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.”
Assuming that the UK government is correct to conclude that social media could harm teenagers’ mental health, it ignores the many potential benefits of social media in providing community and access to information. “Social media has the potential to connect friends and family. It may also be valuable to teens who otherwise feel excluded or lack offline support,” the National Academies report found. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning, and other (LGBTQ+) teenagers may find support online that they do not have in their offline world, as do young people coping with serious illness, bereavement, and mental health problems.”
And even if one were to discount these benefits and conclude that banning children from social media would be desirable in the abstract, it is unlikely that the UK policy would accomplish that goal. Six months after Australia’s ban went into effect, the government reported that about 70 percent of children continued to use social media. Children are well aware of how to circumvent age-assurance technology, such as facial recognition and ID checks. If the overwhelming majority of children continue to use social media despite the ban, the policy primarily succeeds in increasing surveillance rather than reducing access.
Starmer acknowledged that possibility but said it is not a reason to refrain from the social media ban. “They get around other laws, too, but we don’t say, ‘Oh, look, a teenager managed to get a drink somehow, so let’s not bother banning alcohol sales to children,’” Starmer said, according to the New York Times. “We don’t do that, that would be utterly ridiculous, and so I just don’t accept that argument.”
What Starmer failed to acknowledge is that underage drinking is quite different from the use of social media, which provides the ability to express and receive information and therefore carries many more potential social benefits and raises fundamentally different constitutional questions.
Starmer also fails to account for the policy’s impact on adults. The announcement said that the government would introduce “highly effective age assurance” measures, but it did not specify the required technology. This technology either estimates age from a facial scan or requires the user to upload a driver’s license or passport.
Indeed, the UK recently began requiring age verification for online “harmful” content such as pornography, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that the use of these technologies on platforms such as Reddit was “chaotic,” requiring people, including adults, to surrender their anonymity to continue to use platforms. EFF wrote that “users reported various bugs in the age-checking process, like being locked out or asked repeatedly for ID despite complying.”
Requiring sensitive information such as facial scans or photo IDs risks real privacy violations. This is not merely hypothetical. Last year, Discord’s age-verification provider suffered a data breach, compromising 70,000 users’ government identification cards.
The UK’s minimization of the severity of these problems is particularly ironic, as it has a long and proud history of anonymous speech. For instance, in the 1700s, a pseudonymous writer known only as Junius wrote dozens of letters to a London newspaper, criticizing King George III and many government officials. His letters had a great impact on public sentiment, and to this day, his identity is unknown.
Under the UK’s plans, the next potential Junius would be less likely to criticize the government on social media, as a third-party age assurance provider would have collected Junius’s face scan or photo ID.
Jeff Kosseff is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Future of Free Speech and the co-author (with Jacob Mchangama) of the new book The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026).