Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan]

My hon. Friend raises a really important point. This cannot be about shutting down avenues for young people to socialise with each other. Whatever action is taken to make it harder for young people to access social media, we have to make sure that other things are going on in society so that they do not feel that that is the only place they can go to socialise.

The petitioners’ view, as I said, is that we should ban access to social media until children are 16. I spoke to the NSPCC before this debate; its position is that it does not think an outright ban is the answer. Without changing the software or the devices, a ban on children using social media—without doing more—would be unenforceable. The NSPCC’s view is that a ban would push children into unregulated and more dangerous online spaces.

Does the Online Safety Act do enough? Several people I spoke to in preparing for this debate think that it does. For example, there is a requirement for social media companies to conduct children’s access assessments to determine whether children are likely to access their platform. There are online age assurance measures that require social media companies to assess whether their services are likely to be accessed by children and to adopt robust methods such as photo ID matching, facial age estimation and mobile network checks.

Age assurance measures are of course right, but groups such as Smartphone Free Childhood do not believe that risk assessments, and the Online Safety Act more broadly, go far enough. They do not advocate for an approach of risk assessment and risk reduction methods; rather, they say that the onus should be on the social media companies to demonstrate that their apps are safe for children to use and that, if they cannot, their app must not be used by children. That seems to be the opposite of putting the onus on the regulator to prove that an app is dangerous or harmful. It might well be that that would be something the code of practice under the Online Safety Act could do. It would require tightening that code of practice, so it would be useful to know whether the Minister agrees that the Act would be capable of reversing that burden, and that we ought to think about those methods.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

Does the hon. and learned Gentleman agree that, while legislation can go so far, we have a broader responsibility as adults in society and as parents—myself included—to make sure that we monitor not only what our children are using and how they use it, but our own habits? A headteacher in my constituency was alarmed that she had to write to parents to tell them that when they collect their infants from the playground, they should put their phones away and have eye contact and engage with their children.

[Tony Vaughan]

The hon. Lady makes a common-sense point: if we are going to advocate for change, we have to lead by example. It might be said that the harms we are talking about are a somewhat separate issue to that. Of course we need to take responsibility, but where we have social media companies that are pushing content that is objectively dangerous, we need to have the conversation that we are having today about how the system and social media companies should be forced to ensure that that space is a safe one.