UK Government Announces Ban on Under-16s Using Social Media, Following Australia’s Lead
The UK Government announced Wednesday a proposed ban on under-16s using social media, alongside stricter feature restrictions to address growing concerns about teen online safety. The UK becomes the second major democracy to enact such a ban after Australia’s December 2024 legislation. Italian PM Giorgia Meloni separately told the G7 her government would not push for a similar ban, calling it “no panacea”. The Times opinion column describes the move as “a watershed for liberal views about online free speech”. Civil-liberties groups and tech-industry bodies have begun publishing immediate responses.
The under-16 ban is the most material UK platform-regulation intervention since the Online Safety Act 2023 came into force. The Australian December 2024 legislation provides the structural precedent: enforcement via platform-side age-verification, with penalties on the platforms rather than individual under-16 users. The UK Government framing prioritises mental-health concerns linked to algorithmic content exposure during adolescent brain development. The structural implementation challenge is age-verification at scale without creating broader privacy harms; the Online Safety Act’s age-verification provisions create the technical framework. The Meloni position is the structural EU-side counterpoint: ECHR-jurisdiction concerns about proportionality.