Age checks are easy to dodge and bans drive teens underground, writes The Drum’s Alistair Young. Real protection means platform accountability, moderation and digital literacy – not headline-friendly prohibition.
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I don’t doubt that politicians mean well when they talk about banning under-16s from social media. The harms are real. Anyone my age has seen them up close: bullying amplified by algorithms, content that no teenager should stumble across and the strange rewiring of attention that comes from growing up with a phone in your hand. Pretending those risks don’t exist would be dishonest.
But copying Australia’s under-16s ban and pretending it’s a serious child-safety solution is something else entirely. It’s not really about protecting children. It’s about looking tough, signalling concern and winning an argument on the front pages while knowing full well the policy won’t work in practice.
Australia’s model is already revealing the problem. The ban isn’t enforced on teenagers directly, but on platforms, which are told to identify under-16s, remove them and keep them out. How they do that is left deliberately vague, beyond the acknowledgement that a simple ‘Are you over 16?’ box won’t cut it. The result is a system that relies on age verification tech that young people are already discussing how to bypass, from VPNs to spoofing location and identity.
Teenagers have always been better at getting around rules than the adults who set them. They did it with alcohol, cigarettes and fake IDs long before social media existed. Now they have Reddit threads, group chats and entire online cultures dedicated to showing each other how systems work and how to break them. A ban doesn’t remove risk; it just pushes it out of sight.
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That’s the part politicians rarely acknowledge. When you force something underground, you don’t make it safer. You make it harder to see, harder to supervise and harder to talk about. A teenager with a hidden account is less likely to ask for help, less likely to flag abuse and more likely to feel they’re the one in the wrong if something goes bad.
Even supporters of Australia’s ban seem to understand this on some level. The same polling that showed strong public backing also suggested most people don’t actually think it will work and many parents say they’ll only enforce it selectively, or not at all. That’s not a sign of rebellion. It’s a quiet admission that the policy doesn’t match real life.
The UK debate is starting to follow the same script. Social media has become the perfect political villain: abstract enough to blame for everything from mental health crises to social breakdown, but familiar enough to scare parents. Proposing a ban is a neat shortcut. You don’t have to wrestle with algorithms, moderation, platform design or digital education. You just say ‘no’ and move on.
What gets lost is that the online world isn’t just where the bad stuff lives. For many people my age, it’s where we learned how to think politically, creatively, socially. It’s where niche interests were tolerated, where awkward teenagers found communities and where opinions were formed outside whatever happened to be on TV at home. Shutting that down doesn’t send kids outside to play. It just narrows their world.
There’s also something uncomfortable about the contradiction at the heart of this argument. We tell young people they must be digitally fluent for work, education and citizenship, but not trusted to navigate digital life itself. We talk about freedom of speech and access to information, then casually propose cutting an entire age group off from one of the main ways those things now function.
If the goal were genuinely child safety, the focus would be messier and less headline-friendly: better moderation, clearer accountability for platforms, proper digital literacy and parents being supported to set boundaries rather than outsourcing them to the state. None of that fits neatly into a culture-war announcement.
Banning under-16s from social media doesn’t fix the internet. It just makes adults feel like they’ve done something about it. And the people left dealing with the consequences quietly, privately and with fewer safeguards will be the kids themselves.
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