A YEAR AGO, tech journalist Elaine Burke invited me to co-host her long-running podcast, For Tech’s Sake. The first episode we recorded together in 2025 looked at the introduction of age verification for social media and online platforms within the EU and the UK. Our takeaway back then was that age-gating certain corners of the internet was a nightmare to implement and a disaster for privacy.
Twelve months on, things have developed in a more extreme way than anticipated. We found ourselves revisiting that conversation in light of the UK government’s controversial decision to introduce a blanket ban on social media for teenagers under the age of 16. From spring 2027, teens in the UK will lose access to Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X, Facebook and Bluesky, though they’ll still be able to use chat apps like WhatsApp and Signal.
The Brits aren’t the first to do this, as Australia banned young people from TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Threads in December 2025. The ban aimed to deactivate accounts of under-16s and prevent them from setting up new accounts.
Now, the Irish Government is considering a ban of its own, albeit one that involves the input and guidance of the EU. Some believe we’re in an advantageous position as we get to see how things unfold in the UK, but realistically, Australia’s ban has shown us everything we need to see.
Pureprofile surveyed teachers, parents and young people to see how things were going. In 2025, 84% of Aussie kids had sustained access to the banned platforms. In 2026, this has dropped by just 6%, to 78%.
As expected, kids managed to find ways around the age verification process, as they often tend to do when they’re told they’re not allowed to do something. Not that this took much work: 31% of underage kids had used the face-scanning tech meant to keep them locked out, and nearly half were determined to be over the age of 16.
How this could impact the rest of us
These age-related bans are frustrating for a number of reasons, including the logistics of implementation and enforcement, which are highly impractical and represent a genuine risk to everybody’s privacy. Most people are reluctant to share their ID or biometric data with websites that they visit to prove they’re over 18, and there are valid reasons to be distrustful of how these platforms handle our data.
It’s also disappointing to see Big Tech let off the hook once again. These regulations absolve social media giants of their responsibility to protect younger users by allowing them to boot kids off of the platform and continue hosting harmful content. It doesn’t get to the root of the issue, nor does it improve the platforms for the adults who use it.
What’s more worrying is that the removal of young people from these platforms could result in a further deterioration of existing standards. While we rarely frame it this way, children and young people have played an invisible and thankless role in social media communities. Their presence online has legally obliged social media giants to maintain basic standards of decency.
Many of the safeguarding measures that exist across social media platforms today were originally introduced to protect younger users. When MySpace introduced the concept of private profiles way back in 2006, it was a compulsory privacy feature for users under the age of 16. Had young people not been on social media, it might have taken much longer for this feature to become the norm – and it’s a feature that many adults use with zeal.
Abandonment of safeguards
In my lifetime, I’ve seen social media companies take significant (though not always sufficient) steps to limit the proliferation of harmful content pertaining to eating disorders and weight loss online. That’s largely due to the fact that the onset of eating disorders is most likely to occur in adolescence and early adulthood. Because this content is most harmful to teenagers and young people, there is greater pressure for these companies to mitigate harm.
Nobody likes seeing weight loss advertisements online, but I suspect that when kids are out of the picture, we’ll start to see more of them. The same goes for gambling advertisements, which have been banned from television between 5.30 am and 9 pm to reduce young people’s exposure to gambling products since the Gambling Regulation Act was introduced in 2024.
Data protection hasn’t always been the strong suit for many tech companies. In light of that, individuals under the age of 18 have their own unique data protection rights. These rights must be respected by any site that young people are “likely to access”, which is a broad term encompassing social media, online gaming, entertainment sites and educational resources online, among other services.
When the Data Protection Commission drafted this guidance, it suggested that service providers can implement these standards for all users irrespective of age by providing a “floor of protection.” If young people are banned from these platforms, there’s no incentive to extend any additional protections to adult users, beyond the bare minimum.
Across the board, when higher standards are introduced for the safety of children, the rest of us often benefit.
A huge amount of work needs to be undertaken to make the internet safer, more secure and more useful to people. This isn’t going to be achieved by sending children into exile and pretending that solves all of our problems. In fact, doing that may just end up creating a whole new set of problems.
Access bans for teenagers could usher in an era where social media companies can abandon the steps they have taken to ensure the well-being of users, instead turning the burden back on users by writing off safeguarding as the responsibility of individual adults.
What is being touted as “regulation” may actually end up looking more like deregulation, heralding the end of the standards we have come to expect.
Kelly Earley is a writer and podcaster from Coolock, who has a deep interest in culture, technology, community and social justice. She writes for The Journal every week.