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Should we ban social media for under-16s?
00:20:17
Ian Sample is joined by co-host Madeleine Finlay to explore what the evidence indicates about the harms of social media and the impact of banning it outright
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- [00:00]
Maddie Bender
This is the Guardian.
- [00:10]
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- [00:45]
Ian Sample
This morning, Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood behind a podium and made an announcement that upset a lot of UK teens, although it probably pleased their parents. This is not something I do lightly and I will not present presented as cost free as if social media has brought no benefits to young people, because clearly that is wrong. But government is always about choices and it's clear to me that a full ban is the right choice. Under 16s will be banned from some of the big apps like TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and X. It comes in response to growing concerns that social media is one of the driving forces behind the youth mental health cris. It will make a huge difference. It will make our children safer, it will make our children happier and will give them more time, more security, more freedom to grow up, more opportunity. The UK isn't alone in taking this step. Australia has already enacted a ban. France and Canada are in the process of bringing one in, and Spain and Portugal have announced plans to do so. Our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone, space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation, violence. We will no longer accept that. But will taking away access to teenagers favorite online spaces help? How will the whole thing work and could there be unintended consequences? Today we discuss all the evidence and ask should teens be banned from social media? I'm the Guardian Science editor, Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly. Maddie, I'm sure when a lot of teenagers woke up this morning, they were in an even worse mood than usual because we heard that Keir Starmer hopes to ban access to some of the big social media sites for under 16s by spring 2027. Where did this come from then?
- [03:05]
Maddie Bender
Well, this move is both a little surprising and then absolutely not surprising. For a long time it seemed like Keir Starmer wasn't actually that keen on a ban, or at least was quite sceptical about enacting one. But pressure has been mounting from all directions for a little while now. So in January, 60 Labour MPs wrote to the Prime Minister calling for a ban following Australia's that came into force in December. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has been vocal on this too. And so the government has been doing this consultation and they received about 116,000 responses. So this was the second largest government consultation in history. So this is clearly an issue that the public are very engaged with. And it's really reflected by the huge popularity of this book, the Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, which puts the youth mental health crisis down to the mass adoption of smartphones and what he calls the great rewiring of childhood.
- [04:14]
Ian Sample
So what's in place at the moment and what's coming down the line?
- [04:18]
Maddie Bender
So there have been age restrictions put in place on sites to reduce access to harmful content, and platforms aren't supposed to be pushing certain subjects to children. But there's obviously been a feeling that this just isn't doing enough. In April, the government announced bans on smartphones in schools too. So you could see this ban as a kind of next step. And it's also worth saying, Ian, that this proposed ban goes even further than the Australian one. The plan is that live streaming and communication with strangers will be blocked for under 16s on a wider range of online services. So that might be something like gaming platforms. These restrictions would also be on by default for 17 year olds and chatbots, which simulate sexual relationships and perform role play with users. Those will be made 18 plus.
- [05:17]
Ian Sample
So what's the problem this is trying to tackle? What is the ban actually trying to get at?
- [05:23]
Maddie Bender
Ultimately, it's the youth mental health crisis. Since the 2010s, at least, there's been a really well documented significant decline in young people's psychological well being. According to data from NHS England, in 2023, one in five children and young people aged eight to 25 had a probable mental health condition. And this number's been rising since 2017. And you can understand why this has been linked to social media, because this is a massive fundamental shift in the lives of young people. According to a 2025 Ofcom report, around 97% of teenagers aged 13 to 15 now have a mobile phone and they spend around four hours a day on it, which doesn't even include time spent gaming. And young people are having to navigate this new world, a world which is designed to keep them engaged for as long as possible. You know, there's the infinite scrolls, there's the pings, there's the personalized Algorith These features are really well documented and actually just last month, meta. So that's the company that runs Facebook and Instagram. They reached a settlement agreement with a US school district who were seeking damages to pay for dealing with the impacts of social media on their students. Because this school district claimed that the platforms were deliberately designed to be addictive and that this was resulting in harms to their students ranging from anxiety to self harm.
- [07:00]
Ian Sample
Because we know these apps are designed to keep us hooked and sometimes that can also lead to seeing really problematic content or frankly, just being in an unsafe place.
- [07:11]
Maddie Bender
Absolutely. So there are plenty of risks associated with these social media sites. So it might be opening children up to cyberbullying, to exploitation, and exposure to sites where you can interact with adults and strangers. But a big one, like you said, is exposure to harmful content. So if you go online and you're already struggling with your mental health, or maybe you're just actually just having a bad day, we know that these algorithms are designed to give you more and more of the content that you're interested in. And this is illustrated by one very sad case of a girl called Molly Russell. Now, some of our listeners may have heard about this. In 2017, she took her own life when she was just 14 after suffering from depression and as the coroner described it, the negative effects of online content. It turned out that on Instagram she'd view disturbing and graphic content of suicide and self harm, some of which was glorifying and encouraging it. The same was true on her YouTube account where there were a high number of posts concerning anxiety and depression, self harm and suicide. Now, a charity that was set up in Molly's memory, the Molly Rose foundation, recently found in a study that 47% of girls aged 13 to 17 encountered high risk content during a seven day period. And that's content related to suicide, self harm or eating disorders. They also showed that children with low well being or those with special educational needs were at even greater risk of seeing this kind of content.
- [08:59]
Ian Sample
Okay, Maddie, so there've been some really awful, really heartbreaking examples of how social media can and does cause harm. But where does the wider evidence stand on how social media is impacting children and teenagers?
- [09:14]
Maddie Bender
I think the first thing to say here is that this is a really difficult thing to study on a kind of population level. Right? Because the moment you start asking what's the impact of social media on adolescents, you immediately run into questions like is it time spent on social media or is it time spent on the phone itself? Is it time not doing other stuff like going to the park. Is it that young people who are struggling already with mental health problems are more likely to use social media more or in a different unhealthy way? It's very difficult to do the kind of experiment you might want to do to figure it out, which would be getting a group of kids saying, some you use social media this amount, some not using social media at all, you know, doing other things on their phone, like, hey, reading the Guardian and then having some kids that are not using phones at all. But without that, so far, in terms of the research that we have on this, you only really have correlational studies. So looking at the wider data and looking at trends, and some researchers have pointed out that the conclusions from these studies are small and mixed anyway. And I was looking actually at a big review done a few years ago by a scientist that we've had on this podcast, Amy Auburn. She studies the impact of digital technology on young people and she's given evidence on bringing in social media restrictions to the government. And her review found that the evidence was pretty lacking in terms of its quality, but that the overall association between digital technology and psychological wellbeing, it was negative, but it was very small.
- [11:03]
Ian Sample
So there isn't any good population wide evidence that social media is harmful?
- [11:08]
Maddie Bender
No, there is better evidence when you look at excessive use. So, for example, a study of 90,000 children born at the start of the millennium found that the rates of depression went up in line with time spent on social media. And this was particularly true for girls. Those who were on social media for more than five hours a day were three times more likely to become depressed than those who weren't on it at all. And actually, a study from Imperial College London that came out just a few months ago found that at three hours a day spent on social media, children were more likely to develop depression and anxiety as teenagers. But once again, you have to ask, is this the social media or is it just the excessive use? At high levels of phone use, children might have disrupted sleep. They might not be getting enough sleep, they might not be hanging out with their friends or talking to their parents or spending time outside.
- [12:11]
Ian Sample
It's quite interesting, isn't it? Because clearly parents observing their children do often think that, that it's harming them. And according to the government's consultation, nine in 10 parents said they would support a social media ban for children under 16.
- [12:26]
Maddie Bender
I wonder whether this partly reflects the fact that there's very few other levers that parents can pull right when it comes to their kids. Social media use clearly, companies haven't made their platform safe enough in the eyes of government and parents. So what's left? But Ian, let's talk about the evidence for a ban, because actually there isn't any. And that's because the only ban in place has only been operating for six months. And Amy Auburn, the researcher that I mentioned, she actually announced in January a plan to study 4,000 children in Bradford. And participants in this study would be put in groups where one would have their social media time curtailed to one hour a day. And so that was the kind of study that I was describing earlier that, that you would want. Now, they do expect to get the results from this in 2027. So that's potentially after the ban has been enacted anyway. But just because there's a lack of evidence, it isn't necessarily an argument against it. Some people might say that we need to be proactive in reducing potential risks. And you know, I have seen this argument that if there was anything else that had clear, specific individual cases of children being harmed, say, you know, if it was a toy, that that thing would be banned and recalled. Right. So you can see it from that point of view
- [13:56]
Ian Sample
coming up. Is a ban really the best way to keep young people safe Online.
- [14:07]
Maddie Bender
Foreign.
- [14:15]
Ian Sample
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- [14:43]
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- [15:25]
Ian Sample
Maddie, there are arguments against a ban. What are those?
- [15:29]
Maddie Bender
Absolutely. So it's likely that young people will Find other places online. Then you also have to consider the benefits of social media for young people. It might be connecting with family, friends or people like you, beginning to work out who you are, maybe accessing support, important information. This is especially important for teens from marginalised groups. Plenty of LGBTQ adolescents see social media as a real lifeline. Beyond these benefits, there's the question of what happens when teenagers turn 16. Are they going to be thrown into social media when they're at an age where they're more independent anyway? And some people have called this a potential cliff edge. You have to ask yourself, does this ban risk letting companies off the hook from removing that harmful content and restricting these features that make it, you know, make it what it is? Amnesty International has called the ban the right diagnosis, the wrong prescription. And to that point, Bibang Kidron, a member of the House of Lords and a social activist who advocates for children's rights in the digital world. She said she'd turn the argument around. And instead of denying children access to apps, tech companies should be denied access to children until they can guarantee respect, privacy and safety.
- [16:59]
Ian Sample
So how will it be enacted? How do you ban under 16s from social media?
- [17:05]
Maddie Bender
The first thing that will probably happen is that accounts of under 16s will be deleted. Then for the accounts that say they are 16 and above, I would imagine then age verification. So that's what's happened in Australia. So you have to prove that you're 16 and above. Kids, of course, can get around these things. I saw one very funny example of kids using AI image generation to give themselves mustaches, which, you know, sort of bypasses the face scanning stuff. Anyway. There's also VPNs. So these are tools that you can use where your device thinks you're in another country, a country that doesn't have this kind of ban. And I will say that six months on from the ban in Australia, there's been mixed reports of how it's working and how parents are feeling about it. An article in the Guardian chatting to a few different parents about this. You know, some said it was worthwhile, that it was a tool that was allowing them to kind of battle the devices. But others said the legislation was toothless and that it hadn't worked.
- [18:14]
Ian Sample
So what are your reflections on all of this?
- [18:18]
Maddie Bender
Well, yeah, okay, so will the kids still be on socials? Probably. Kids are ingenious when it comes to things like this, but I do wonder whether it will change the conversation and hopefully change the conversation in the right way. So will we start to have a different view on social media and the companies. I think the important thing is to keep pushing for better regulation of these platforms because this is a bit of a blunt tool and you will have kids on there. So you have to keep pushing for the companies to be regulated more tightly to keep protecting young people beyond the ages of 16. And Ian, I do think that we always feel when it comes to technology, like we're sort of running to keep up with it. And I think this is what could be happening here as well with AI, because right now we're talking about social media accounts. These platforms have been around for ages. The features that we're talking about have been around for ages. And so looking forward, you think, well, what about AI? What about ChatGPT? You know, there are sadly already individual cases where teenagers have been harmed or have taken their own lives, where their use of AI chatbots has been raised as, as part of this. And so really, I guess it's thinking about how do we make the online world generally a better place for young people?
- [19:52]
Ian Sample
And I agree with those people who have these concerns that there's nothing here to improve social media platforms. You know, if this was food that we were talking about, you know, parents can ban children from eating sweets or ban them from eating particular types of food, but there is a massive emphasis on trying to get food manufacturers to make better products, healthier products. It's a shame that there isn't anything that is going to try and make online content just better for children to stop keeping them online for hours and hours a day purely for ad revenue. I mean, this is not going to change at all under this ban.
- [20:29]
Maddie Bender
Yeah, we need to get to the fundamentals ultimately.
- [20:32]
Ian Sample
Maddie, thank you very much.
- [20:34]
Maddie Bender
Thanks, Ian.
- [20:38]
Ian Sample
In response to the proposed ban, spokespeople for Meta, Snapchat and YouTube said that bans risk isolating teens and pushing them towards less safe services. Thanks again to Maddie. And for more on this story, you can listen to the most recent episode of Politics Weekly with Pippa Creera and Kieran Stacey. They discuss the details of the ban and the challenges the government might face trying to implement it. And that's all from us. This episode was produced by Madam in Finley. The sound design was by Ross Burns and the executive producer was Ellie Bury. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then.
- [21:24]
Maddie Bender
This is the Guardian.
- [21:34]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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