Is the UK under-16 social media ban a good idea?

It’s time we talk about the under 16 social media ban…

If you’ve been keeping up with the news recently, you’ll have seen a lot of chatter about the proposed under-16s social media ban in the UK, and I’ve found myself really torn about it.

Because on one hand, if you’d told me at 15 that my MySpace profile and MSN access was about to disappear, I’d have been absolutely beside myself.

Hours spent fiddling with HTML, picking the right song lyrics for captions, treating my MSN name like it was a personality statement. It felt huge at the time. My whole social life lived online, and taking that away would have felt brutal.

So I really do get why the idea of a ban feels massive for kids now. They’ve grown up with the internet right there, always. It’s how they socialise, how they express themselves, how they stay connected. Losing that wouldn’t feel like a small change.

But adult me can’t ignore the other side of it either.

Growing up online wasn’t as harmless as it felt

Looking back, social media was often the first thing on my mind in the morning and the last thing at night.

At the time, it just felt normal. Everyone was doing it. That was the internet. That was growing up.

But normal doesn’t always mean healthy.

I do sometimes wonder how differently things might have felt if I hadn’t been comparing myself to carefully curated feeds before I’d even worked out who I was. If my worth wasn’t being measured in likes, comments and profile views.

And that’s where the conversation around an under-16s social media ban starts to make more sense to me.

Why I support it, in principle

I don’t think social media is evil - it is my job, after all. I don’t think the internet needs demonising. And I definitely don’t think banning something automatically fixes everything.

But I do think growing up is already hard enough without being constantly watched, measured and compared before you’ve even found your footing.

We’re also starting to see a real tangible impact, and it’s happening quicker than we might expect.

• Around 1 in 6 children aged 5–16 in England now have a probable mental health disorder
• Those figures have risen sharply in recent years, particularly among teenage girls
• Heavy social media use is consistently linked to anxiety, low self-esteem and poor sleep

So yes, in principle, I support the idea of putting some boundaries in place. Giving kids a bit more breathing room. Letting them grow up without everything being documented, judged and fed back to them by an algorithm.

Even if 15-year-old me is crying a bit inside about it.

Where I start to feel uneasy

What makes me pause is how neat and tidy a ban looks on the surface.

Governments get to look decisive, and platforms get to look responsible. Everyone gets to say they’re doing something.

But what worries me is whether this becomes the end of the conversation instead of the start of a harder one.

If kids technically aren’t meant to be on these platforms anymore, does that make it easier for companies to turn a blind eye to the amount of harmful content still floating around. Does responsibility shift from fixing the problem to saying “well, they shouldn’t be here anyway”.

Because the cesspool of unfiltered content that we’re currently wading through on platforms like Meta and X doesn’t magically clean itself up. The culture doesn’t suddenly change.

A ban on its own doesn’t fix the stuff that’s polluting platforms in the first place.

It can’t stop there

If we’re serious about protecting young people online, it can’t just be about access.

It has to be about how platforms are designed and how comparison is baked into the experience. How engagement is still prioritised over wellbeing, again and again.

Otherwise, a ban risks becoming a point-scoring headline rather than a real solution.

So, is a U16 social media ban a step in the right direction?

I can miss my MySpace era, I can feel nostalgic about MSN and badly coded profiles, and I can still believe that something needs to change.

I support the under-16s social media ban in principle, but I don’t want it to be a box ticked and forgotten about. I want it to be the start of a longer, more nuanced conversation about how we make the internet a healthier place to grow up in.