Protecting Children Online in the UK Requires Smarter Tools, Not Blanket Bans

Every generation has faced its moral panic. Politicians once blamed comic books, rock music, television, and video games for harming children. Today, social media is the latest scapegoat. To that end, the UK’s House of Lords recently voted in favor of an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would ban children under the age of 16 from using social media. While the goal of protecting children online is important, this proposal risks cutting off millions of teenagers from vital platforms for staying informed, connected, and expressing themselves, while also threatening adults’ online anonymity. Repeating the “tech panic” cycle does not make it evidence-based—and the science simply does not support claims that social media itself is the root cause of today’s youth mental-health challenges.

Blanket social media bans are a sledgehammer response to a complex problem. The UK proposal would cut everyone under 16 off from all social media, including platforms that already provide robust safety tools, parental controls, and age-appropriate design. In doing so, it treats all teenagers as equally vulnerable and all parents as equally incapable of making decisions for their own families.

The goal may be child safety, but the result would be sweeping collateral damage. A ban would sever millions of teenagers from essential spaces for communication, creativity, civic engagement, and access to information—while doing little to address the real sources of harm online.

In practice, bans don’t solve safety problems—they displace them. When lawful platforms are closed off, young users don’t disappear from the Internet. They migrate to harder-to-monitor spaces with fewer safeguards and less accountability. That makes children less safe, not more.

The proposal also creates serious downstream risks for adults. Enforcing a universal ban would require aggressive age-assurance systems that push platforms toward intrusive identity checks, threatening online anonymity and privacy for everyone—not just minors.

The UK should resist the urge to legislate in haste. Its consultation process exists for a reason: to allow educators, parents, researchers, platforms, and child-safety experts to weigh in before irreversible policy choices are made.

Protecting children online is essential. But protection should mean smarter design, stronger safety tools, and greater parental control—not blanket bans that remove technology from young people and choice from families. The UK’s approach to online harms to children should remain grounded in thoughtful, child-centered policy, not panic-driven policymaking.