British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced legislation to ban children under 16 from accessing major social media platforms, positioning the United Kingdom alongside Australia as one of the first countries to take statutory action against children’s social media use on the grounds of demonstrated harm to mental health and exposure to addictive and dangerous content.
The proposed restrictions, expected to be introduced into Parliament before the end of 2026 and implemented from 2027, would block access to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and X for under-16s, while also imposing additional controls on online gaming, livestreaming services, and interactions between children and strangers across digital platforms. Messaging services including WhatsApp were expected to remain outside the scope of the restrictions.
Starmer said growing evidence of the damage social media was doing to children’s mental health, combined with the addictive design features deliberately built into platforms to maximize engagement, had made government action unavoidable. He said the government was also considering overnight digital curfews for young users and restrictions on infinite scrolling features, with further details to be announced in July following the results of consultations with teenagers and parents that had shown widespread support for stronger protective measures.
The prime minister acknowledged that some children would find ways to circumvent the restrictions but rejected the argument that circumvention risk justified inaction, comparing the approach to the existing legal prohibition on alcohol sales to minors where enforcement challenges did not invalidate the principle of regulation. Britain said its legislation would go further than Australia’s groundbreaking December ban by extending restrictions to livestreaming and child-to-stranger interactions across gaming platforms in addition to conventional social media.
