Starmer says the U.K. says will go “further than any country in the world” to keep teens off social media

The U.K. is the latest country attempting to keep kids and teens off of their social media accounts. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a bold piece of legislation that, when it goes into effect next year, will restrict youth access to most major social platforms.

Ten platforms — TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Threads, Twitch, Kick, and Reddit — are expected to be covered by the incoming ban. Children under 16 will be barred from those platforms, though the U.K. must still figure out the nuts and bolts of its legislation. Starmer indicated that regulations could pass as soon as Christmas, with enforcement set to start in 2027.

“It is clear to me a full ban is the right choice,” Starmer said. “This will make our children safer, will make our children happier, will give them more time, more security, more freedom to grow up.”

Australia set the tone for the rest of the world when it passed a law that banned under-18s on major platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Detractors included Amnesty International, which described the ban as an “ineffective quick fix.” Lawsuits soon followed, with both Reddit and individual teenagers launching legal challenges against the Australian government.

Despite widespread criticisms of the ban, other countries soon indicated that they planned to follow Australia’s lead. The U.K. is the latest nation to add its name to that list, and Starmer wants to up the ante. He said that the U.K. will go “further than any country in the world” to protect young citizens from the mental health harms they encounter online.

Even if Starmer wasn’t planning to make the U.K. ban even more severe than the Australian version, the measure was destined for unpopularity. A Livity report conducted in the U.K. found that 95% of local teens believe that watching videos helps them with their schoolwork. Now, they could lose access to that resource.

Representatives for companies like YouTube and Meta were quick to claim that the planned U.K. regulations would not make kids feel safer. YouTube’s rep said that “blanket bans push kids out of curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less safe services.” Meta’s rep took a similar line by noting that “isolating teens from online communities and information” directs them toward “unregulated alternatives that lack built-in protections and parental controls.”

Encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal will be excluded from the U.K. ban, so teens will still have a few apps available for safe interactions. At the same time, the exclusion of Roblox from the ban could play into predators’ hands.

“It is not yet clear how they will treat gaming sites,” Internet Law Professor Lorna Woods, who teaches at Essex University, told the BBC. “Though if they follow the Australian approach, these will lie outside the Australian ban.”

The U.K. must also figure out how to stop kids from sidestepping enforcement by using VPNs to access restricted platforms. If these issues are not fully considered before next year, the U.K. could end up validating Big Tech’s fears about a ban that does more harm than good.