On June 15, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the UK government would ban under-16s from accessing social media and enforce stricter age-gating mechanisms to protect children from the harms and risks of social media and the internet. You can read MediaNama’s reporting here: [ Press conference | Public consultation ]

Here is how social media platforms, experts and civil society groups have reacted to the UK’s proposal of banning social media access for children:

Signal would exit the UK if it had to ‘verify’ its users:  “We would rather exit a market than undermine the technical guarantees that people trust for their privacy. That doesn’t change based on jurisdiction, it doesn’t change based on year, and it’s not something we take lightly. We’re not just flexing or being recalcitrant,” said Signal President Meredith Whittaker in Bloomberg’s The Mishal Husain Show. Explore more here: [ Interview clip | Full statement ]

Surveillance attempts in the guise of child protection, Signal states: “Keir Starmer announced what seems to be a fairly hasty proposal to implement nudity scanning as a mandatory feature on all devices sold or used in the UK, where you could only opt out if you provided some sort of verification that you were above a certain age threshold. There are very few technical details on that system. But our position—on client-side scanning, the debate that circled the Online Safety Bill (now Act)—is that this constitutes very dangerous mass surveillance. Having a scanning system on your device that is purportedly designed to detect nudity can easily be weaponized by governments for political speech or other content,” she further added.

How are other social media companies reacting to the UK’s proposed social media ban? Predominantly, social media and communication platforms have argued that outright social media bans will leave children in less regulated or unregulated spaces without parental controls, leading to more risks and harms. Some of the statements made by the big tech companies are: 

• Snapchat says bans will push children to less safe spaces: “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,” according to an official spokesperson quoted by CNN. However, it also said that it ‘supports government efforts to protect people online.’
• Meta also believes that bans will drive children to unregulated platforms without parental controls: “Bans risk isolating teens from online communities and information, and driving them to unregulated alternatives that lack built-in protections and parental controls,” according to the official spokesperson quoted by Time Magazine.

• YouTube also believes that blanket bans will push children to less supervised and anonymous platforms: “Blanket bans push kids out of such curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less safe services,” according to the official spokesperson’s statement quoted in Time Magazine.
• Roblox acknowledges the moderation lapses and is open to engaging with policymakers: “When you have millions and millions of games that are, you know, being created all the time, sometimes something slips through. And we are not perfect, and we want to be honest about the fact that we’re not perfect. And that’s why with these kids in selected accounts, it’s a much smaller set of content,” said Roblox’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, in a brief interview with Sky News. “We caution about going overboard, with outright bans,” he added.
• X’s Elon Musk said that the UK’s social media ban is a censorship law disguised as a child protection law:  “This censorship law is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The real goal is to enable the UK government to track everyone,” said Elon Musk on X.  He further added: “Censorship always comes with a ‘protect the children’ lie”
• Telegram says that teens will switch to VPNs and can access more illegal content: “Banning social media for teenagers only puts them in greater danger. Teens are forced to switch to VPNs — and unlock far worse illegal content. We’ve seen this before. When the Russian government banned Telegram, 95% of Russian teenagers continued to use it. They just moved to VPNs, Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Signal, said.

Telegram’s Durov also said: 

• Parents’ approach towards smartphones should change first: “No law can replace good parenting. Parents already have the tools to limit kids’ digital consumption: parental controls, screen-time limits — or no smartphone at all. Instead, many parents give toddlers iPads just to keep them quiet. No amount of regulation will fix that.”
• The risks of giving up online anonymity through all-user verification: “All social media users in the UK will have to “prove” they’re over 16 — with an ID, face scan or bank card. Thousands in the UK are already arrested for political posts every year. Is this really about protecting children — or identifying more people to arrest?

TikTok, Discord and Twitch have not made any statement or comments on this particular issue yet.

Author of Anxious Generation welcomes the UK’s decision to ban social media for children: “Well done, UK Govt; well done PM Starmer.  UK Parents love the policy, and the evidence keeps mounting that heavy social media use causes a variety of harms,” wrote Jonathan Haidt, psychologist and author of Anxious Generation. Read his article on: The Case Against Social Media: Seven Lines of Evidence. 

The harms lie in the platforms’ inherent design, features and functionality: “Such laws do not address the deeper issue, which is to understand how various harms to children’s well-being on social media could stem from the inherent design, features, and functions of digital platforms. Specifically, discussions on age gating fail to consider how social media platforms can be effectively redesigned to be safer, open, and healthy spaces for children,” said SFLC. It further added: “SFLC.in is of the view that such solutions fail to address the core issue, are likely to create more safety risks for children, and effectively undermine children’s rights”

Consultations should not focus primarily on ‘tech-illiterate’ parents: “Please stop asking parents. Parents are tech illiterate, not technical experts and don’t get to decide what the entire country must endure. They also weren’t told that mandatory identity verification would be required for everyone. Poor reporting from the BBC,” said Paul Walsh, a technologist who works on online safety & privacy. He was responding to this report from the BBC. 

“A control question should have been “will you submit your ID to access sites on the internet?” I would be very interested then to see what, if any, discrepancy there was,” argued Prateek Waghre elsewhere. He is a technology researcher. 

Also read MediaNama’s coverage of the key findings of the UK’s public consultation here. 

Social media ban will impact vital use cases of disabled children: “We are mindful that this ban risks cutting off vital routes to connection for children who are already too often excluded. We are actively looking at ways to counter the impact this could have,” says the UK-based Royal Society for Blind Children.

Platforms should change first; UK govt and Ofcom should hold them responsible for deceptive design: “Real change must come from the platforms themselves. Tech companies must be held accountable by Government and Ofcom for their harmful design choices, their reckless algorithms, and their failure to take responsibility for dangerous content. Children and young people deserve stronger protections and age-appropriate experiences, which recognise the realities of their lives,” said Chris Sherwood, CEO of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC ). Access the full letter signed by 42 child protection charities and online safety groups here: [ PDF ]

Why is the UK pursuing a ban despite its age-appropriate design code? “If the age-appropriate design code was such a success why is the UK government going all in on a ban? I’ve seen a number of people praise this code, and I could never quite understand why (in practical terms),” asked Prateek Waghre on X. Explore the full code here. 

He also argued: “Australia’s example already shows circumvention is trivial. Evidence is mixed. Harms and benefits cannot be netted out the way politicians want just to say they’ve done something. Right now, what we’re getting is an age gate for internet and a future with escalating restrictions on things like VPNs, Tor, etc. There are issues, but national-level bans are not the answer.” Read his full article here: Locking Out: Why Blanket Social Media Bans Won’t Protect Children

Bans without platform-level reforms will still open the harms to everyone: “An age limit may change when children reach these platforms, not what is waiting for them when they do. If harmful content is not removed and the algorithms that recommend it are not made safer, the same risks remain in place for every young person once they turn 16 or find a way around the limit sooner. Restricting individual access without regulating the platforms themselves won’t solve these problems. A ban also risks taking away the protective parts of these spaces along with the harmful ones,” said Dr Holly Bear, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford. Read Science Media Centre’s compilation of expert reactions to the social media ban here. 

Govt-mandated logins will enable mass surveillance, and platforms-led verification will lead to massive data collection and privacy violations: “The most obvious way to do this would be a government-mediated login system. This would essentially grant government an immense amount of metadata about who logs in to what, how often, etc…. The instinct to protect children is good, but we cannot protect them by quietly dismantling the privacy and freedom of the entire society. The cure must not be worse than the disease,” wrote Luke Neilson and Mike Campbell. They vice president and director of research and education at the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. Read the full column here: A Social Media Ban for Minors Requires Data From Everyone

“‘Protect the children’ too often becomes ‘show me your papers.’ Britain’s age-verification push and Washington’s online-safety bargain risk building speech-control infrastructure in the name of safety,” wrote Greg Lukianoff, CEO of FIRE, a US-based free speech advocacy group.

UK law professor warns about the overarching powers of the Commission, including secret investigations & hearings: “The Digital Safety Commission of Canada will be a super-regulator of the Internet, with greater influence over the daily lives of Canadians than perhaps any other regulator in the country. The breadth of its influence can’t be overstated: it will set the standards that millions of Canadians must satisfy to verify their age in order to use social media services. It will establish what platforms must do about harmful content, including the removal of certain material. It will determine whether the age-gating requirement may be lifted for any given service. It will both regulate the platforms and advocate for their users, dual roles that raise obvious fairness concerns. And it will exercise investigative and adjudicative powers, complete with penalties, hearings, and formal, law-enforcement-style investigations. Yet despite all those powers, it will not be bound by the rules of evidence, will be free to conduct its hearings in secret, and, at least in the beginning, will be capable of operating as a one-person body in which the Commission and its Chair are one and the same individual. The full scope of the new powers is illustrated in the infographic below,” wrote Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. He also heads the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law.

UK Parliament to debate the petition against social media ban: In February, shortly after the UK PM announced that they’d pursue a social media ban for children, Leo Rhodes opened a petition on the UK Parliament website. It had about 1,88,372 signatures at the time of writing this report. This figure exceeds the number of respondents (1,16,211) during the UK’s public consultation process. The petition remains open until August 11, 2026. 

Important reads: 

• A social media ban will not save our children, by IFF’s Apar Gupta. 
• Why banning children from social media avoids the real problem by MediaNama’s Nikhil Pahwa.

Read MediaNama’s reporting of the roundtable discussion on “Age Verification and Restricting Social Media for Children” here, 

Also read: 

• Karnataka CM Proposes Social Media Ban for Under-16s: What Challenges Lie Ahead?
• Can content moderation be a solution for children’s online harms?
• Social Media Harms Children, But Blanket Bans May Miss the Real Problem