The government has launched sweeping new plans to ban social media for under-16s – and technology companies have warned that it could in fact put young people at greater risk.
Announcing the changes that will take the UK further than any other country in cracking down on social media, prime minister Keir Starmer said that “a full ban is the right choice” and that it was necessary to “give kids their childhood back”. "It will make a huge difference, it will make our children safer, it will make our children happier, it will give them more time, more security, more freedom to grow up, more opportunity,” he said in a press conference.
Technology companies have long pushed back against such rules. They claim that it could in fact endanger children, and it would also mean that if successful they would lose access to a large and profitable user base.
In response to the new announcement, technology companies stressed their existing technologies for young people and claimed again that such rules could in fact put children in danger.
TikTok for instance said that it had already been working on ways to keep teenagers more safe on its platform but that it would look to better understand the new measures.
"We share the government's goal of safe online experiences for teens, which is why teen accounts on TikTok have more than 50 preset safety and privacy settings, such as private accounts, and we continue to invest in the latest technologies to advance platform safety,” a spokesperson said. “We will examine the details of the government's measures, and we look forward to collaborating constructively with the government on this important issue.”
YouTube warned that a blanket restriction could push children toward “less-safe services”.
A YouTube spokesperson said: “We’ve invested in expert-led, age-appropriate experiences and default protections for teens for over a decade and will continue to do so.
“YouTube is a vital resource for young people, educators and parents. Blanket bans push kids out of such curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less-safe services.”
As he announced the ban, the prime minister suggested there would be a carve-out for online learning tools such as YouTube Kids.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said: “We share the goal of keeping teens safe online, which is why we developed Teen Accounts to automatically limit who can contact them and the content they see. Like others, we don’t think bans will achieve this goal.
“As we’ve seen in Australia, bans risk isolating teens from online communities and information, and driving them to unregulated alternatives that lack built-in protections and parental controls.
“To be both effective and easy for parents, any restrictions must be underpinned by an age verification system on devices so people aren’t asked to hand over ID to dozens of individual services to prove their age.
“We will continue to engage with the government and Ofcom as they work to implement this policy.”
Snapchat suggested that a ban on its app could not protect children but instead put them at risk.
“Because the majority of time spent on Snapchat is in private messaging between friends and family, an outright ban that disconnects teens from those relationships doesn’t make them safer – it may simply push them to less safe platforms.”
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