Why an under 16s social media ban won’t improve online safety
With the United Kingdom moving towards banning under 16s from accessing social media, Dr. Maia Almeida-Amir & Prof. Ariadne Vromen provide a rights-based perspective following the Australian ban.
Dr Maia Almeida-Amir & Prof. Ariadne Vromen, University of Glasgow
In November 2024, Australia became the first country in the world to ban under 16s from ten major social media platforms. Now the UK, and many other countries, are considering following suit. But blanket bans on young people’s access to social media do not meaningfully provide security or protection from digital harms to this population. This is largely because blanket bans conflate restricted access with safer access, framing young people as vulnerable objects for protecting rather than as rights-bearing participants in digital society.
The logic behind blanket social media bans assumes that reducing young people’s exposure to these platforms will automatically reduce their exposure to digital harms. But, by leaving the structural conditions that produce online harms unaddressed, this policy approach figures young people’s presence online as the central source of harm, rather than the business practices of powerful platforms. The design features of social media platforms – their inadequate content moderation, predatory advertising, algorithms, or other attention capturing technologies – are far more proximate sources of digital harm to users regardless of age.
Taking a rights-based perspective further highlights the shortcomings of blanket ban social media policies. As digital technologies become increasingly central to all our lives, the same is true for young people for whom social media platforms are key sites of social participation, identity-formation, information access, and civic engagement. Restricting access therefore risks overemphasising protection to the detriment of young people’s rights to free information, expression, association, and political participation as identified in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These concerns compound for marginalised young people (particularly LGBTQ+ young people) who rely on online communities for support and to access information that is unavailable elsewhere.
Rather than treating young people’s use of social media as a problem to be eliminated, policy must recognise it as an enduring feature of contemporary life and work in collaboration with young people to identify and enact harm reduction governance approaches. The world’s first social media ban of under 16s in Australia is in its early days of implementation, but is already having mixed results. Most notably, it is not effective in its primary aim of removing under 16s from mainstream social media platforms, but also that it disincentivises the creation of safer platform tools, may force young people to migrate to fringe platforms, and it cuts young people off from accessing news media severely impacting their civics knowledge. The Australian ban did not engage with or seek support from young people for its formation. Young people still want to use social media to connect with their peers and access information, and are still using a variety of means to do so.
This failure to involve young people is a recurring feature of policymaking around online safety more broadly. Public debates about the safety of social media frequently position young people as being both uniquely at risk from digital harms, but also as being uniquely risky users of digital technologies. Drawing on popular (though empirically questionable) anxieties about cyberbullying, manosphere radicalisation, screen addiction, declining attention spans, and mental health crises, this framing is emotionally powerful but ultimately misguided in its policy application. By focusing on the management of young people’s digital behaviours it forecloses on engaging with young people themselves, ignores capacities to hold platforms to account, and normalises invasive state intervention.
When young people are consulted about their digital lives, they do not describe victimhood; they describe resourcefulness. Discounting these experiences from policymaking reproduces paternalistic logics that objectify and problematise young people at best and at worst, by leaving harmful platform structures intact, push young people towards more dangerous online lives.
The policy challenge should therefore not be whether or not young people’s online participation should be made illegal, but how to support that participation. This necessitates moving beyond prohibitive policy proposals and towards the meaningful inclusion of young people’s experiences in digital policymaking, developing targeted responses to specific harms and building towards safer digital infrastructures. These could include improving moderation systems, limiting data extraction and advertising aimed at young users, and building more robust safety affordances into platforms. These alternative approaches all have one goal in common: lifting young people’s voices and integrating them into policy that truly supports their wellbeing.
Dr. Maia Almeida-Amir is a Research Assistant in the Political and International Studies division at the University of Glasgow.
Prof. Ariadne Vromen is Head of Head of Division of the Political and International Studies division at the University of Glasgow..