Social Media Ban for Under-16s

The progress report that we are publishing today sets out lots of different perspectives, but our consultation showed overwhelmingly that parents and children are concerned about what children are being exposed to online—harmful content; content that is completely inappropriate for their age; and abuse and exploitation. Parents are worried about the impact on children’s sleep, school, physical health and emotional wellbeing. Above all, parents are crying out for change. Nine out of 10 parents who responded to the consultation told us that they want an outright ban on social media, as did three quarters of parents who responded to our large-scale representative survey and the 113,000 parents who signed Daisy and Joe’s Smartphone Free Childhood petition.

Keeping children safe online has been my top priority since day one in this job. I have listened to calls, especially from bereaved families, to act as quickly as possible. Today I announce our first steps, with more to come next month. I can confirm that we will ban social media companies from providing their services to under-16s. [Applause.]

We want to address concerns that there will be a cliff edge when a child turns 16—an age when young people should be especially focused on their future and exams. I can announce that livestreaming and stranger communication, including in gaming, will be switched off by default for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds. I am also strongly minded to bring in default overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds. I will set out further details in my next statement in July, once our pilot schemes are finished.

I know that not everyone supports a ban, and I have listened carefully to the concerns and want to take each in turn. First, we have seen in Australia that many children will try to get around a ban, and succeed. That is inevitable when social media has been such an integral part of their life. We will introduce more highly effective age-assurance measures better to support compliance, and I have asked Ofcom to share proposals on that within months. However, I want to be clear to parents, and to Members of the House, that our ban is as much about helping future generations, and resetting social norms in future, as it is about young people today.

Secondly, people worry that a ban would push children on to riskier, less regulated sites, and that is something that I take extremely seriously. I have had a long conversation with Ofcom and its new chair, and have written to them to stress once again that enforcement of the Online Safety Act 2023 and our new ban must be a top priority. Ofcom must focus rigorously on that, including in relation to riskier sites, and I have asked for an urgent review of whether it has the right capabilities in place. I have also asked Ofcom to publish a clear enforcement strategy, and an annual report to Parliament on how the strategy is progressing.

Thirdly, we must prepare children for the online world, which will inevitably be part of their life. Many schools are already doing that, but from September this year, every pupil across England will learn about social media in the classroom, including AI and how to spot deepfakes. My Department has produced new advice for parents on how to talk to children about the online world. It is called, “You won’t know if you don’t ask”. This is schools and parents together preparing children for the future.

Lastly but by no means least, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and my hon. Friends the Members for Kettering (Rosie Wrighting), for Hertford and Stortford (Josh Dean), and for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) have rightly raised the importance of ensuring that all young people can access information, trusted support and exciting activities, especially if they are no longer spending so much time online. We are delivering on that, too. The Secretaries of State for Education and for Culture, Media and Sport are expanding what is on offer in every school and beyond the classroom, including after-school clubs in the holidays and at weekends. There is support for a wide range of enrichment activities, such as art, music, sport, cooking, camping and museum visits—things that were once available only to those who could afford them, but are now available to every pupil in England. In stark contrast to Conservative Members, who cut youth services by 75%, we are investing £500 million in our “Youth Matters” national youth strategy, so that children from all walks of life, wherever they live, can access youth services, sport and the arts.

My driving force, and the reason I came into politics, has always been and will always be to give every child, from every background, the best possible start in life, because that is how they and our country succeed. Today, we take a decisive step towards creating a safer, healthier life for our children and future generations. We are giving children their childhood back. I am clear-eyed about all the challenges that social media brings, for adults as well as children, and technology constantly changes. Today’s announcement is not “one and done”, or the end of the story. There is still much more to do, but this is a landmark day—a day when we stand with parents, charities, bereaved families, and all those who have campaigned for change. This is your moment. It is a day when we take power away from the tech giants, who have had countless opportunities to keep children safe, and put it in back in parents’ hands. It is a day when we give our children the freedom to be children again, so that they have the best possible start in life. I commend this statement to the House.

As Conservatives, we believe in the ultimate responsibility of parents over their children, but they face huge challenges in keeping their children safe online. It is not simply a matter of denying them a phone or a computer. There are many good uses of tech that children and young people should be free to explore, but the onus is on us, as adults, to create a positive place for their exploration. Instead, activity that would never be tolerated in the real world has been normalised, monetised and algorithmically amplified, to the detriment of kids.

The Online Safety Act 2023 was a step forward, but we better understand now that it is not just what children see, but how social media works. The success of the policy will depend heavily on its implementation, and the announcement still begs many questions. What additional resource is the Secretary of State giving to Ofcom? She is asking the regulator to take on a substantial amount of extra work. Does she expect tech companies to contribute more towards the regulator’s budget or will the funding come from her own budget?

When can we expect precise definitions of what brings a platform into scope? A list of banned platforms has been briefed today, but it is not clear why some do not make the cut. Can the Secretary of State guarantee that this work will not distract from implementing the final stages of the OSA? What lessons has she learned from the circumvention of the Australia ban that will make the UK experience and our ban more effective?

The Secretary of State talks about more effective age assurances, and I agree with her about the need to reset social norms, but will she be ruling out mandatory digital ID as a requirement for accessing social media? What privacy protections will be in place if children’s images are taken as part of face scanning for age verification? Is she considering age verification at app store level as a means not only of more reliable protection of children, but as a chance to reduce friction for adults wishing to access social media?

The Government have said that they are considering overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18s. How do Ministers square granting 16-year-olds the solemn duty to vote, but not the power to have a cheeky night-time scroll on Instagram? The same applies to romantic chat bots. How is this going to work? Will the restrictions apply to 16-year-olds or 18-year-olds, given that both meet the age of sexual consent? On efforts to prevent children from taking or sharing nude imagery, will the Secretary of State set out the scope of the law she is considering and categorically rule out client-side scanning tools being applied to adults’ phones?

We are told that the first set of regulations to enable the social media ban could be in effect by spring 2027. How confident is the Secretary of State that she will achieve her timeline? She will understand that this policy is not easily implemented—she has made reference to that—and she has detractors who share the aim but not the means, fearing that a ban pushes children out of supervised accounts and towards riskier services. What does she say to those, like Ian Russell, who believe that this policy is not only wrong but cynically timed? She suggests that it comes down to enforcement of the OSA, which makes my earlier questions more relevant.

Finally, I wish to ask the Secretary of State about her tweet last week on updating the Online Safety Act to remove illegal content with greater speed during “times of crisis”. The scenes in Belfast rightly appalled every decent citizen in our nation. The vicious barbarism of Hadi Alodid, just like the despicable murder of Henry Nowak, has ignited anger and sparked protests that have led to indiscriminate violence against innocent people. Violence and protest can often mix, but they are none the less two very different things. Laws exist that prohibit incitement, criminalise threats to kill and stop platforms from hosting illegal content, and they must rightly be enforced with strength.

On the other hand, peaceful protest is a legitimate response to failure—in this case, the perceived failure of the political class to adequately deal with concerns that the public have raised time and again via the ballot box. In such circumstances, I appreciate that the Government have a job on their hands to ensure that work to stop the spread of illegal content is not perceived to be or does not become an attempt to obscure legitimate political comment. What powers are being taken? How will “times of crisis” be defined? What assurances can the Secretary of State offer the House that she understands that if the Government do not get their approach right, any actions she proposes risk stoking the very unrest that her policy is designed to subdue?

For too long, we have implicitly decided that childhood and parenting must simply adapt to the darker manifestations of the internet as a reality of modern life. Giving parents the support that they need is not the same as the state stripping them of their ultimate responsibilities, but when harm from social media to our children is real and growing, the time comes for action, even when the answers are not perfect. I look forward to working with the Secretary of State on ensuring that the implementation of her policy is as close to perfect as it can be.

The hon. Lady also asked about the model that we are following. We plan to follow the model of Australia, and that covers not just the companies I named in my statement, but others. That is publicly available information.

The hon. Lady rightly asked about highly effective age-assurance measures. She will know that they are already covered for adults in the Online Safety Act. Not all of them are appropriate for children, so we have asked Ofcom to look at this issue as quickly as possible and to come up with something that will work. That is really important, but, as she will know, having read the Online Safety Act, privacy is absolutely at the heart of those measures. There are really strict requirements about any data collected, what it is used for and how it should be deleted. The measure regarding AI chatbots is for those aged 18 and under, because we think there are parallels there with issues such as pornography.

The hon. Lady asked about comments I put out on X last week on essentially incitement to violence online. If somebody incites violence online, it is the same as inciting violence offline, and that is not acceptable. This week in Parliament we are laying Ofcom’s updated code of practice about what to do in crisis moments, which is essentially to take down illegal material. I think most people in this country would agree that if somebody breaks the law and incites violence, they should face the full consequences, whether it is online or offline, and I support that.

I know that in this House there is normally a lot of theatre around the politics—I understand that, as that is what this place is like—but the vast majority of Members support a ban. I hope we can all work together, because parents, no matter their politics, want the same thing. Let us crack on with the job.

Our approach is supported by more than 40 charities and experts who stand up for children and a safer online world. It would create a clear framework for new platforms and future harms that have already arrived, whereas Australia is playing a game of whack-a-mole. We can learn to do better, so why have the Government not learned from the experiences of other countries as the Secretary of State said she would? How will the Government protect children from emerging threats and addictive features elsewhere, and not just prevent young people from signing up? How are the Government deciding what platforms will be included? What framework differentiates YouTube from YouTube Kids, for example, and will children still be able to access YouTube without an account, as they can now? What addictive features will be tackled, beyond infinite scroll, and what assurances are there beyond the Government being “strongly minded” to act?

We do not mind the Prime Minister borrowing our ideas; we just wish he had borrowed all of them, and sooner. Of course, we continue to offer our services to work together. Our approach would ban harmful social media for under-16s by default and set a new safety standard to make the internet truly a safer place, just like the standards for films and toys that we have had in the offline world for decades. Children are growing up in the attention economy, where their focus is being sold. They deserve a Government who treat this as a seatbelt moment, not a press release for Makerfield. Will the Secretary of State use this opportunity to truly hold the tech giants to account and back a harms-based framework that puts children’s safety at the heart of this quickly changing technological world?