Noah Romsdal Hallundbæk Sørensen
Britain wants to ban under-16s from social media.
Children under the age of 16 would be completely barred from TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
16 and 17-year-olds would face a fixed “bedtime” on the platforms and could not be contacted by strangers.
The British government wants to pass the legislation before Christmas and bring it into force by next spring.
According to DR
A far-reaching intervention
The plan is one of the most sweeping regulatory models for social media anywhere in the world.
Children under 16 would be cut off from platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, X and Snapchat, while 16 and 17-year-olds would be prohibited from livestreaming or receiving messages from strangers. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Messenger are not included in the ban.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made clear what is driving the plans. “Social media is making our children unhappy. They deserve better,” he writes in a press release.
The government also wants to introduce a stop to so-called doomscrolling, where one video automatically follows another, and to require users to be at least 18 before they can use chatbots with romantic or sexual content.
Amnesty warns of the wrong medicine
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the approach. Kerry Moscogiuri, the head of Amnesty International in the United Kingdom, acknowledges the problem but questions the solution.
“The diagnosis is right, but the medicine is wrong,” she says, according to The Guardian.
Amnesty argues that the core problem is not young people on social media, but the algorithms that hold their attention.
“Young people must be able to be safe online, but they also have rights. Social media can expose children to harmful content, but it is also where they learn, make friends, seek support and come together around shared causes,” Moscogiuri says.
Tech giants fear the opposite effect
From Meta’s side, the warning is that a ban risks pushing young people towards platforms with far weaker safety measures.
“As we have seen in Australia, a ban risks isolating teenagers from information and online communities and may push them towards unregulated alternatives with no built-in safety features or parental controls,” a Meta spokesperson says, according to BBC.
YouTube adds that the company has invested in protecting young users for more than a decade.
Australia introduced a similar ban for under-16s in December 2025, but the legislation has since been criticised for being difficult to enforce.
Denmark is heading in the same direction
In Denmark, the SVM government and a parliamentary majority have already agreed on an age limit of 15 for social media.
The new government intends to follow through on that agreement, but with one tightening: parents of children as young as 13 will no longer be able to apply for an exemption, as had previously been announced.
