Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Max Wilkinson Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Lola McEvoy]

I fully support what my hon. Friend says. Lots of parents in Darlington have said that although the default setting may be that children cannot access chat rooms on games or a more violent version of a game—because it is not just the phones and devices, but what they are accessing on those devices that really matters—they just lose the battle. When it comes to the crunch and their child is arguing that they want to go on the device and they are going to have a tantrum, they just allow them to go on it. Parents need more support from us as legislators, which is basically my point.

Children should be able to enjoy games and access safe and engaging educational content. Platforms should not be allowed to target them with suggested content. That is where the problems are coming in—with suggested content, children are exposed to harmful and unhealthy things. Platforms should have children-safe search engines, and features including live location and chat rooms should be designed to be transparent and child-friendly, with their safety at their heart. Accessing certain social media features, such as chatting with adults who they do not know or sharing content, should be solely for those who have been strictly age-verified as over 16.

[Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her work with my constituent, Ellen Roome, on issues to do with children and social media. As a Liberal, I am instinctively against banning things. However, liberal society has long tolerated minimum age limits for things that might be dangerous for children, such as cigarettes, alcohol or driving. Does she agree that we should consider social media use in the same light?

[Lola McEvoy]

That is absolutely right; I am grateful to the hon. Member for his intervention. It is important that we strike the right balance. For a long time, we have been behind on protecting children online. It is time now to use the Online Safety Act 2023 and the upcoming children’s codes to get it right the first time. We do not know how they will bed in, and it is crucial that we get it absolutely right with the first iterations of the children’s codes in April.

To be able to chat with strangers or have content suggested to them, a person should be age-verified as over 16. For me, the online world is a hugely valuable part of modern life. As with everything we do offline, we must ensure that it is safe and regulated for children to use, and if it is not, we should not let them use it.

In Darlington, I have set up an online safety forum with year 10s across every secondary school in the town. Their biggest concern is the disturbing content that the Online Safety Act and children’s codes should protect against, but they have also flagged to me awful, horrible examples of peer-to-peer bullying, which is totally acceptable on social media platforms and goes unchecked. Ofcom is required to issue new codes every three years, so if the first codes do not get it right in April, we could be waiting for three years for a 13-year-old to be protected properly, by which point they will be 16 anyway.

The age to use social media in its current form, where platforms can suggest content and children can chat unchecked with strangers, should clearly be 16. Those whose age is not verified should be able only to access child-safe, limited platforms designed for children. That is common sense. I am concerned that without further legislation, platforms will be left to implement their own safeguards. In some cases, those may well be good, but our job is not to leave the protection of children online to chance. We should stipulate an age, require ID and be bold leaders in this space. Our children will look back and ask us what we were waiting for.