Social Media: Ban for Under-16s

Ian Murray Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2026 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Online Safety (Ian Murray)]

It is a great pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Hobhouse. It has been a superb debate. I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on introducing this e-petition debate. It has been a very thoughtful debate, and rightly so, because questions about children, social media and online safety go right to the heart of family life in this country.

I have two young girls aged six and one. Although they are not yet at the stage of social media and telephones, the daily fight to get them off screens at that age requires the diplomatic skills of the UN, because screens are everywhere. As parents we probably set the worst examples. Our whole lives are on our phones now, whether we are at work or trying to do family admin. We all live in a digital age where we are more connected than ever before. Being online can bring huge benefits, from making new connections to learning new skills. I pay great tribute to Leo and his colleagues for setting up this petition and getting the issues brought into the public domain, while we highlight the trade-offs that the Government have to make to keep children safe.

I want to be absolutely clear from the start that children are at risk of real harm online. Those risks have been present for some time, and successive Governments have failed to regulate to keep children safe online. As the Secretary of State has made clear, our ambition is not simply to make the online world safer, but to enable and empower children and young people to use it safely. That requires an active Government who are prepared to step in when children are being harmed, but also to step in to give children alternative uses for both the online and offline world. We are not starting from scratch. The Online Safety Act introduces one of the most robust systems globally for protecting children from harm online. It is important to state that the Act is not perfect, but everything that we do beyond this builds on the Act. It is one of the most robust pieces of legislation globally to try to protect children from harm.

I take on board the criticisms and points made by the hon. Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) and other Members about the Ofcom analysis, which showed that over the first nine months it had not seen a major reduction in online harms among children. None the less, we can prove the counterfactual that there has not been a massive increase, so perhaps the Online Safety Act is working to the extent of not increasing the harms. However, we want to get the harms to the lowest possible level.

We have to be honest: we will never deal with 100% of harms. What we are trying to do with the Online Safety Act and all the regulations on top of that—the under-16 social media ban, features and functionalities bans, and AI chatbot restrictions—is layer on as much as we possibly can to increase the number of harms we can take out of the system. We will never get to 100%, though, and we have to be honest about that.

The Online Safety Act’s child safety duties came into effect in July 2025, requiring platforms to prevent children from encountering pornography, self-harm material and suicide and eating disorders content. Providers must also protect children from other types of harmful content such as violent content and bullying and abusive content. But we always knew we had to do much more. That is why earlier this year we launched the “Growing up in the online world” consultation to hear directly from parents, experts, stakeholders and, more important, young people themselves. The wider public also had to be involved in deciding how we can make the online world safer and more enriching for our young people.

The consultation received more than 116,000 responses. Nine in 10 parents who responded told us they support a ban on social media for their children. The analysis showed they were screaming out for help, to go to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith). Although what we heard from young people themselves was more nuanced, two thirds of children who responded to the consultation told us that they would support age restrictions for under-16s on at least some social media. Ofcom’s latest research found that almost three quarters of children aged 11 to 17 had seen or heard potentially harmful content online in a four-week period, including six in 10 who encountered bullying and five in 10 who encountered hate content directly.

We believe that social media services create unique risks for children, and while many of them have made welcome changes, they have not gone far or fast enough to keep our children safe. We think that the responsible thing to do is ban social media companies from offering services to children under 16, but it does not stop there. This is not about stopping children from going online altogether; it is about making sure that the services they use are safe and suitable. To make these changes work, companies will be required to use highly effective age assurance that is backed by Ofcom’s robust enforcement powers.

[Sam Carling]

I appreciate the Minister’s tone and the different considerations he is bringing in, but does he agree that it is very difficult to define social media? We have a definition in the traditional sense, but there are social platforms now that operate primarily on an anonymous basis instead of having identities behind them, and there are online gaming platforms and so on. How do the Government propose to deal with the fact that social media is a very loose term now?

[Ian Murray]

That goes to the heart of the problem, because social media is indeed a very loose term. Platforms that might have been out of scope are perhaps being brought into scope by having new functionalities that we might think are different from the social media platforms we are seeking to regulate. For example, Spotify has introduced stranger conversation functionality to its platform. Does that mean that it comes within scope? It depends how social media is defined and whether platforms are morphing into something different. For example, when Facebook was first introduced, it was a service for bringing university students together and letting them communicate with each other. It is now a worldwide content platform where anyone in the world—billions of people—can sign up for an account, interact with each other and upload their own content, which can be served through algorithms; of course, every bit of it is monetised. My hon. Friend is right that technology is moving very quickly, as is the definition of social media, and that is why the regulations have to be flexible enough to deal with some of those harms. I will return to the question of scope shortly.

To answer the question asked by the hon. Member for North West Norfolk, the first regulations will be laid before Parliament before the start of the Christmas recess, with restrictions coming into effect in spring next year. While social media services pose a unique risk, there are, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) said, other services that children can access that have many of the same harmful functions. That is why we are also preventing under-16s from accessing some of the riskier features. They will not be able to livestream themselves or communicate with strangers on a wide range of services, including gaming. We call this the Australia-plus model because we are bringing in gaming, which is not included in the restrictions there. 16 and 17-year-olds will have those protections applied by default. There will be no cliff edge on the adult social media experience: when they hit 16, restrictions will be applied by default when they enter an account until they are 18.

We will introduce default protections for 16 and 17-year-olds on persuasive features on social media such as autoplay and personalised feeds to support young people to manage their time online. We will also apply default overnight curfews, including muting push notifications. Many Members have mentioned the other features and functions on social media that are addictive but may not be as harmful as the really extreme harms, such as child sexual exploitation or some of the other stories we hear. There is a spectrum of harms, including the addictive nature of social media, the lack of sleep from using it and the neurological difficulties it is causing in the adolescent brain—that is why social media companies design them that way. In fact, there is a Science and Technology Committee hearing tomorrow morning on the neuroscience of childhood and how social media is affecting children. It is worth looking into these big issues, and that is why we are applying overnight curfews to try to combat the impact on sleep and attention as part of the social media defaults, including muting push notifications.

These protections will sit alongside a wider package of measures including stronger safeguards around AI chatbots and measures to promote a more positive and educational experience both online and offline. We want children to enjoy the benefits of the online world but give parents the confidence that they can do that safely. We know that regulation alone is not enough. We must also help children and young people to build media literacy and critical thinking skills to navigate the online world safely and prepare them for an increasingly digital future.

I have spent a lot of time in schools in my constituency talking to 11 to 15-year-olds about the social media ban. I think hon. Members are absolutely right to suggest that we do not give young people enough credit for their understanding of dangers online. They understand when there are things online that they should not be seeing. They are very much aware of bullying and of those addictive features, and we do not give them enough credit for being able to navigate this themselves.

We are therefore strengthening digital resilience and media literacy through changes in the curriculum and practical support for parents and carers, while helping children and families to access high-quality online content. This is about building on the protections that we already have and going further where children need us to. The Government cannot and will not look the other way. We must move more quickly and decisively to keep people safe online, and nowhere is that responsibility more important than in protecting children from harm.

Since I took on my online safety role in the reshuffle, I have spent a lot of time with grieving families. I encourage all Members of this House—Ministers, Cabinet members, Back Benchers and those who are just interested in this issue—to spend some time with the grieving families to hear directly from them how social media has impacted their family life. They have some incredibly difficult stories that are harrowing to hear, but I think all Members should hear them. The test for the Secretary of State and me is that if we get to the end of this process and find that all these regulations would not have saved their children from the harms that led to their deaths, we will have failed their children and failed to protect the children of the future from harm. That is a very high bar, but it is a bar we have to meet, because the social media companies have not. Over years, if not decades, they have consistently turned the other way, and they are starting to take action only because they realise that legislation is coming to restrict accounts for under-16s.

Our job as a Government is to build an online world that is safer and more responsible, where platforms take responsibility. If we ask more of the online world, we should also offer more in the real world: stronger communities, better youth provision and more trusted adults around young people. Safety is not just about what we block; it is also about what we build, and we are determined to do that.

I will run through some of the interesting and important questions that hon. Members have raised. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe, who introduced the debate with a tremendous speech, talked about age-gating and the Australian example. What Australia has not done—we have been learning this from Australia—is have highly effective age verification. That is the gateway to making sure that the ban works. Many hon. Members have rightly challenged me, as the Minister responsible, on what that will look like. We are looking at this at the moment. Should it be at the app store level, as the shadow Minister said? Should it be at the device level? Should it be at the level of each individual social media platform? We are working through those issues to see what the most effective option is, but the principle for us is to ask, “What is the most effective system of age verification to ensure that under-16s are protected from social media platforms?”

My hon. and learned Friend talked rightly about the risky parts of gaming. We are bringing gaming into our approach, through features and functions. We will pass the under-16s social media ban this side of the new year, and it will come into effect in the spring of next year; we will then bring forward a host of regulations on features and functions, including stranger communications, which is the biggest problem with Roblox and some of the other issues that hon. Members have raised. That will allow gamers to continue to have the functionality of stranger pairing, but without the ability to talk to strangers in a gaming context. That should resolve some of these issues. A lot of the harms are where vulnerable people are taken from the gaming environment to other platforms, in order for grooming and exploitation to continue. That is a commitment of the features and functions part of this, which overlays the social media ban.

I will talk a little about isolating young people, because that is always on my mind; I know the Secretary of State thinks about it a lot as well. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire, who is the baby of the House—I was hoping to be the baby of this debate, but I have been beaten by probably everybody else in the Chamber—for telling his personal story, which is a very brave thing to do. Isolation is a concern, particularly for vulnerable communities, but from the data and information that we have, we are seeing that the most vulnerable young people are the most susceptible to being involved in these harms.

The balance here is about whether we have these spaces where young, vulnerable people can seek that advice or the communities that they wish to be part of and where they can have that enrichment, or whether we protect them. On balance, protecting people is probably the best place to be, while enriching the offer that we can give young people so that they are confident that they can go to safe spaces with safe people they can talk to about their experiences. This is not an easy thing to resolve. If anyone said it was, they would not be telling the truth.

Let us talk a little about the way back. Essentially, it all comes down to the scope of the social media ban. What we want to do with the ban, which we announced in June, is capture user-to-user platforms whose purpose is to enable online interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside having an algorithm. The Australian regime includes platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. We will not be naming platforms directly in the regulations. Ofcom will subsequently apply the regulations to the social media companies and then determine whether it will produce a list of the companies that are in scope. I will explain what Ofcom will do in the regulations and what the thought processes are. Social media companies that think that they are in scope and that have more than a certain number of users will have to self-notify to Ofcom as being in scope of the legislation, and then conform to the regulations. We are working through the detail of how we translate the Australian scope into the UK context, and it is really important to get this right within that.

Several hon. Members talked about the regulations, about meeting the criteria and about what the off-ramp is. Essentially, the off-ramp or the way back is for platforms to prove, through their design, that they meet the regulations. It is just a case of reversing the situation. If stranger communication is banned and your online platform is subsequently not to be available to under-16s but you have that functionality, it is quite clear that you do not comply with the regulations, so the way back is to comply with the regulations and fall out of scope. That is an easy thing to say but not an easy thing to deliver, but that is the principle with which we will go forward on this.

If there are services like Lego Play or—YouTube has been mentioned—YouTube Kids, are there ways in which you can stop the harms being created by the algorithms, the recommender systems, the commenting systems or the conversations that can be had with strangers? If you have created a service that complies with all the regulations, is it then available to under-16s? I would say that currently the Government’s position is that, yes, there has to be an off-ramp, and the Canada model is something that we are looking at quite closely in terms of its regulations.

[Tony Vaughan]

Can I just clarify something? Is the off-ramp part of the features and functions piece, which is post spring, or will that be part of the ban in the regulations that will be put before Parliament before December?

[Tony Vaughan]

My apologies, Mrs Hobhouse.

[Ian Murray]

Mine too, Mrs Hobhouse. It was such an engaging conversation that we were trying to have with each other, so I do apologise.

I suppose the simple answer to the question is, “We don’t quite know yet, but probably not.” And this is the answer to the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine), in terms of time. When we announced we were going forward with the ban, we had to have a legislative vehicle to put this through. The difficulty with that is this: we took the powers, in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, to put the regulations through. That means that we can do it quickly, and that is why we can make the commitment to do it this side of the end of the year. That then means that we have to make a whole body of potential legislation, in statutory instruments, in one go in December, which is not an easy feat if we want to get this right. I think the discussion about what the way back looks like will have to be a future discussion, probably alongside the features and functions part of the debate later on, after spring next year, when this is being implemented. That is not entirely settled yet, but given what we have to try to achieve by December, it is probably the only way to be able to put that in place.

[Dr Arthur]

I am just trying to get the sequencing right in my head. The Government are going to put regulations before Parliament before the end of the year. We all welcome that. Will it include Ofcom’s thinking about individual platforms, or do we have to wait for that? If we have to wait, when will we hear from Ofcom on that point?

[Ian Murray]

Let me go through the timeline, because it is really important. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act gives us the power to make the regulations. We will make the regulations in December this year. These will come into effect in late spring, and by the time they come into effect, Ofcom will have to have done the work in terms of implementing the regulations, bringing the platforms that are in scope into scope and then starting to enforce what needs to be done. But there will have to be an implementation period after Ofcom has developed the guidance and what must be done on enforcement, so the day from which under-16s will no longer be able to access social media will be in late spring. Between December and late spring, Ofcom will develop the guidance required to implement the regulations. Throughout that process, we will be working on the features and functions, which relate to things like the stranger communications that I have already laid out.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury spoke about her own daughter and about a phone being on her Christmas list. I think the 116,000 responses to the consultation were just parents crying out for the necessary tools. The Labour party conference had many panels on online safety, and the example that was always used was alcohol licensing. Many of us will have a bottle of alcohol in the house; we know that under-18s are not allowed to drink it, but that does not stop some of them doing so. The tools cannot be foolproof, but they give parents the ability to say, “That is harmful to your health. It is harmful to children, and there are laws in place to say you can access that only when you are over the age of 18.” That gives parents the ability to draw a line in the sand, and I think a lot of them are crying out for the tools to help make those decisions.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has put a lot of thought into what is happening on offline activities at the same time. We cannot have a situation in which the online world is restricted for under-16s but there is nothing for the offline world. We have put over £500 million into the Youth Matters fund to refurbish or build 250 new facilities, as well as a £22.5 million investment over three years to support up to 400 schools to provide youth-tailored enrichment schemes. We have made a major investment in the Youth Matters national youth strategy, a 10-year plan to ensure that every young person has somewhere to go, something to do and someone who cares. I think part of having someone who cares is about the ability to open up to someone who is not a parent, which allows a young person to have some of the difficult conversations that they may have sought to have online.

We heard about the nine-point plan of my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington), who is no longer in her place. She has been right at the forefront in trying to see what a way back looks like and what it needs to be effective. I encourage Members to look at that nine-point plan and see the neuroscience event tomorrow that my hon. Friend will be part of as a member of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee.

My constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur), demonstrated what is in his own inbox, which is probably a demonstration of what all our inboxes looked like around the country following the consultation. He highlighted a number of civil society organisations that have very strong views on this issue, one way or the other: they either support or do not support the ban, or they may reluctantly support a ban because something needs to be done. The challenge that the Government face in developing these regulations can be seen not only from this afternoon’s debate, but from what has been said by all the civil society organisations out there. I pay tribute to them all; many of them, such as the Molly Rose Foundation, have been set up on the back of tragedy and in horrendous circumstances. There is no one solution that they are proposing, and it is therefore the Government’s responsibility to find the best way forward that keeps children safe online and has the maximum benefit.

I will finish by mentioning a few more of my hon. Friends who raised some really good questions. We heard about international comparisons and the EU KIDS Act from my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles). We are basing all our evidence on international comparisons. Of course, we have the Australia model, which we talk about a lot, but the Canada model is currently being developed, and there is also the EU KIDS Act, which I was in Brussels talking about just last month. Those international comparisons will certainly affect what we think about, and the Council of Europe is right on this issue. I sat on the Council of Europe many years ago, and it will do a lot of great work in developing both the right of the child and the human right of access and protection from harm, including the protection of children from harm.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth Moor View (Fred Thomas), who is a fantastic resource on this issue, and I thank him for how he has been able to help us develop some of these regulations. Being online has huge benefits for young people, such as the ability to learn the guitar, like my hon. Friend—perhaps he should have given us a little song this afternoon to see whether his YouTube tutorials actually worked.

We often get questions like that—what will people do if they want to try to learn to play the guitar? Again, I emphasise that we are not banning people from being online, and we are not banning children from being online. Logged-out features can be used. If online platforms such as YouTube want to come forward with a new or redesigned platform that complies with the regulations, and wish to test whether they could be removed from scope, it is up to them to do so. In fact, we have been crying out for platforms to do that for many years. We have ended up in this position because they have not complied or had any intent to comply. They must comply with the regulations that are put in place.

I will finish with why we are doing this. I talked about the grieving families. I have a whole folder of their stories in front of me, and the harm is there for all to see. There are extreme cases of child sexual exploitation, children who have had to be taken into safeguarding because of their online experiences, or children who have died. Some of the stories are unpalatable, if we think about our own children; the Government have a responsibility to act.

As the Secretary of State said in the House on introducing the under-16 ban, social media companies have not done enough to keep children safe online. The Ofcom analysis shows that they are still not doing enough. The Government have to step in. We do not want to ban people from doing things. We do not want to ban under-16s from being on social media, but that is the only way in which we can protect children from its harms. We are determined to ensure that children have an enriched experience online, and that media literacy and the education system allow them that experience, but also that they have an enriched experience offline. I think the Secretary of State describes it as giving children their childhood back, which is a really good way of putting it.

Let the message today to Leo and all the petitioners be a really positive one: we hear their concerns, but we back parents, we believe in young people and we are determined to make the online world work better for them. That is the task we have to do between now and December, and it is the responsibility of not just the Government, but all Members. I re-emphasise what the Secretary of State has set as the benchmark: we have to be able to look those grieving families in the eye and say that we have done all we possibly can to make the online world a safer place, so that other people’s children do not end up like their children did. If we can achieve that, we will have achieved something not just for this generation, but for future generations as well.