Social media ban for under-16s in the UK: Cambridge expert reaction

The UK government has announced that social media platforms will be blocked from offering services to British children under the age of 16, in a move it says will improve online safety and “give kids their childhood back”, according to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

The ban is set to include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, but not messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. The government plans to use the same model for a social media ban as Australia, which introduced the policy last December.

However, the UK will be going further than the Australian ban on social media, with blocks to other functions it claims are “harmful” such as livestreaming, as well as restricting certain functions of AI chatbots for under-18s.   

The Prime Minister has said he hopes the legislation will be passed by Christmas, with a ban coming into effect in the spring of next year. 

While many welcome the announcement, with the UK government claiming that up to 90% of British parents support the policy, evidence that bans and other social media restrictions are effective, and improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people, remains limited.

Here, some of the University’s top researchers working on the relationships between digital technology, society and mental health respond to the latest announcement. 

“Whether this is a good or bad policy decision depends on what we consider to be the ultimate goal of this ban,” said Prof Amy Orben of Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, who was last month appointed to a Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) advisory panel on children's online wellbeing.

“On the one hand, this ban will not solve our collective concerns about the increasingly digital childhoods experienced in the UK today. We know from the Australian ban that current enforcements are incomplete, and the majority of young people are still online at similar rates. 

“Evidence synthesis from my team and others shows that we should likely not expect substantial boosts to well-being or mental health in the short term, or large changes in behaviours or rates of parental conflict,” said Orben, who led a major report on the current evidence on impacts of social media on young people, commissioned by DSIT and published in January. 

“However, a ban is likely to change public perceptions, and make social media use less acceptable in younger age groups. This is an important first step in public health education and behavioural change. It can also minimise instances of individual harms for young people who cease engaging with platforms, and over time it can, if done right, change our culture around social media use among certain age groups. 

“First and foremost, the ban is a recognition by government that previous policies to make social media safe have not worked as planned. Banning something for those most vulnerable is a good step if it cannot be made safe. But we know why social media is at times unsafe for not just children but adults as well: this includes harmful content, conduct or communications, as well as design features that make it harder for us to disengage even when we want to. We have failed to adequately address these. 

“By banning under 16s, we are constraining their rights to join in with this part of our digital society, because we have lost trust that we can make social media safer for us all at any acceptable rate. I feel a deep sense of disappointment about this.  

“I welcome the government’s further announcement that it will introduce restrictions on specific design features across the online world that are particularly high risk, such as AI chatbots or engaging with strangers online. However, again, the question will be about the effectiveness of its implementation.”  

Orben concludes that independent evaluation of whether this ban works will be crucial. “The UK government needs to stand by its word and show flexibility in addressing digital harms, as it will be an ongoing process – not a one-stop solution,” she said.

Orben is co-leading the ‘IRL Trial’: the world’s largest trial on reducing social media use among teens, starting in Bradford this year.    

Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He regularly advises governments, public health authorities, and technology companies on how to combat the spread of misinformation.

“On the upside, I'm glad that the government is taking the issue of misinformation, disinformation, and online harm seriously. It's good to see that the government is now interested in taking action,” said van der Linden, responding to the UK government’s announcement.

“Some of the actions that are being proposed are sensible. For example, the banning of sexualized conversations with AI chatbots and messaging with strangers for young people. I think these things are wholly inappropriate.

“On the other side, I think the idea of a wholesale social media ban, or a social media curfew, is problematic. I think this disempowers young people and takes rights away from them, rather than keeping the focus on social media companies, their faulty products, and the need to fix and redesign the business model of social media.

“The Safe Social Media Act in Canada is doing things a bit differently, for example. They are planning to temporarily ban social media as an injunction to give technology companies the opportunity to make their products safe for kids, get rid of risky functionality (e.g. no infinite scroll, no messages from strangers) and so on.

“If you look at what's happening in Australia right now, 60% of kids are getting around the ban, and those kids who are deemed most influential in terms of popularity are still on the platform, which leads other kids to still be on the platform. So the social norms aren't changing, and these bans are not having the intended psychological effects.

“There are also privacy issues if we're going to have stronger enforcement here in the UK via face recognition, for example. Do we want these companies to have images of our children, and how effective and plausible is this going to be in the long term? 

“At the moment, there just isn’t the evidence base to support bans. It's politically popular and seems like an easy solution, but it is not the nuanced one. I'm hoping that, as the government progresses with this proposal, it will consider how to make children safe online in a way that both protects them from the harms but also allows them to enjoy the benefits.”

Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is Chair of Psychology at Cambridge and leads the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group, which focuses on the development of the social brain in adolescence. Last week, Blakemore gave evidence on “neuroscience and digital childhoods” to the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee. 

Responding to the government announcement, Prof Blakemore said: 

“We must make the online world safer for children and young people, but a social media ban alone might not achieve that. Experience from Australia suggests that compliance with the ban is low because young people remain online if their peers do - they don't want to miss out on social connections. 

“We also need stronger regulation of social media companies to make their platforms safer, public health campaigns co-designed with young people, and greater investment in opportunities for young people to connect offline through sport, culture, community spaces and access to green spaces.”  

In her evidence session in the Commons on Wednesday 10 June, Blakemore spoke of how brain regions develop at different rates in adolescence, and how this may relate to social media use. For example, the limbic system, involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing, develops relatively early and is “hypersensitive to rewarding and exciting stimuli in adolescence”. 

In contrast, regions such as the pre-frontal cortex, involved in cognitive processing such as self-control, undergo protracted development throughout adolescence and into our twenties. 

“Self-regulation is really important in many ways in the digital world, particularly if you think about our ability to regulate our digital behaviour and put down our phones when they are bombarding us with exciting stimuli driven by algorithms that tailor our feeds to our interests,” Blakemore told the Select Committee. 

“Even as adults, it is really hard to put our phones down if we are constantly seeing interesting things. As a child or an adolescent, whose pre-frontal cortex is developing, it is even harder.”

However, Blakemore also told the Committee that social media can offer adolescents a window into important social worlds and a way of connecting with other young people. “Young people use digital devices to learn new information. There is a massive wealth of knowledge out there.” She argues that this can be helpful for some young people from certain backgrounds, such as those from more deprived communities.

“If young people’s friends are online, they are going to be online,” Blakemore told the Committee. “They are very driven to be connected with friends and included in their social groups.”

She says that social norms for young people are of critical importance. “The main thing that will motivate them [to comply with a ban] is changing the social norms of their age group, and they have the power to do that themselves,” Blakemore told the Select Committee. 

Fred Lewsey

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