Open Rights Group has responded to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announcement that the Government will ban social media, including gaming sites, for under 16s in the UK.

James Baker, Platform Power and Freedom of Expression Programme Manager at Open Rights Group said:

“These headline-grabbing proposals by a Prime Ministers on his way fail to address the root causes on online harms – business models that reward harmful content.

“The government is on a policy failure ratchet, of policy failures that are followed by more and more censorship and surveillance measures that also fail, because safety is never delivered this way.

Instead, over 16s in the UK will have to hand over identity documents or biometric data to unregulated age verification companies. The Government has completely failed to acknowledge the harms that could come from that. Children also have rights and the ban will harm their free expression and privacy rights.”

The rollout of digital ID for online access

In less than a year, the government has expanded age verification to such an extent so that soon it will be virtually impossible to be online in the UK without handing over identity documents or biometric data to unregulated companies.

Forcing people to prove their identity in this way puts adults and 16- 17 year olds at risk of their personal data being hacked. Discord is one example of a platform that suffered a major data-leak as a result of the introduction of age-assurance.

The Government has ignored calls to regulate age verification companies so that there are privacy and security standards to ensure that users’ sensitive data is protected. Instead it has expanded age verification so that more people are forced to hand over their data to these companies.

Changing the underlying business model

Major social media platforms rely on extensive collection of personal data to target advertising and maximise user engagement. Their business models are designed to keep users online for longer, using algorithms that prioritise content most likely to capture attention and drive interaction. This contributes to the spread of harmful, polarising and addictive content, with consequences for both individual wellbeing and democratic discourse.

Age verification addresses the symptoms not the cause – and even feeds back into the harmful business model. The data shared for age verification can also be used by platforms and the wider data broker ecosystem to send you ads and customised content, fuelling the harmful business model.

Rather than focusing solely on access restrictions, the Government should address the root cause of the problem by:

• Upholding data protection law to stop the intrusive, targeted ads that fuel the attention economy and feed online hate.

• Compelling social media companies to be transparent about the algorithms that determine which content we see and give users the ability to control how they work.

• Compelling social media companies to let us take our followers and data with us if we want to leave their platforms.

About the ban

The ban will include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X but unlikely to include WhatsApp and Signal. It is expected to come into effect in January 2027.