The political momentum behind banning under-16s from social media now feels almost unstoppable. At the start of this year, more than 60 Labour MPs signed a letter urging the government to follow Australia’s example. Polling from LabourList found overwhelming support for a ban among party members across almost every age group. With recent signals that some restrictions will be introduced regardless of the outcome of the government’s consultation process, the direction of travel appears increasingly clear.
The appeal of such a policy is obvious: parents are frightened by the content their children are exposed to online and teachers are increasingly dealing with the social and psychological consequences in the classroom. Many young people themselves openly acknowledge that social media often leaves them anxious, isolated and trapped in cycles of compulsive use. Faced with a genuine crisis in youth mental health, a blanket ban presents itself as a simple and decisive solution.
But Labour should be extremely careful before embracing a policy that is not only unworkable in practice, but fundamentally at odds with progressive politics.
A social media ban would not solve the problem. It would merely relocate it – pushing young people into less regulated corners of the internet while expanding surveillance infrastructure for everyone else. It would also let Big Tech escape responsibility for the toxic systems it deliberately created.
We do not have to speculate about how such a policy would operate because Australia has already provided a live test case. The legislation so frequently cited by advocates has rapidly exposed the limits of prohibition in the digital age. Young people have circumvented restrictions using VPNs, alternative accounts and workarounds that any moderately tech-savvy teen can access within minutes.
Even tech executives themselves have admitted as much before parliamentary committees, acknowledging that any attempt to enforce blanket age restrictions across the internet would be effectively impossible. The reality is that young people are often more digitally adept than the policymakers attempting to regulate them.
The platforms we all use certainly contain harmful material, but they are still subject – however imperfectly – to public scrutiny and content moderation. Forcing impressionable teens away from those spaces risks driving them towards smaller, more obscure and far less regulated platforms where genuinely dangerous content is often easier to encounter and significantly harder to monitor.
Such plans also expose a profound contradiction emerging at the heart of Labour’s position on young people and democracy. This government is rightly moving towards extending votes to 16 and 17-year-olds, recognising that young people deserve a greater voice in shaping the future of the country they will inherit. Yet, at the very same time, politicians are advocating restrictions that would exclude those same young people from the digital spaces where political discussion, activism, and democratic participation increasingly take place.
For better or worse, social media has become part of the modern public square. Young people today experience politics, community and socialisation through a world where the digital and physical are deeply intertwined. We cannot seriously argue that 16-year-olds are mature enough to participate in democracy while simultaneously insisting they must be locked out of the spaces where much of democratic life now occurs.
Clement Attlee once described his vision of Britain as, “a society bound together by rights and obligations, rights bringing obligations, obligations fulfilled bringing rights.” That principle must now be applied to the digital world.
Digital rights matter because digital life matters. As our social, political and economic lives become increasingly mediated through online platforms, questions of privacy, anonymity and access are no longer niche concerns for libertarians or technologists. They are fundamental political questions about power, citizenship and freedom in the twenty-first century.
The enforcement of a social media ban would require a dramatic expansion of surveillance and identity verification online. Any meaningful system of age-gating the internet inevitably depends upon users handing over sensitive personal information – including biometric data, identity documents or facial scans – either directly to tech companies or to third-party verification providers. In practice, this means granting some of the most powerful corporations on earth even greater access to our deeply personal information.
That should alarm progressives far more than it currently does. Online anonymity is not simply a shield for trolls or criminals, as its critics often imply. It protects whistleblowers exposing wrongdoing, political dissidents organising against authoritarian governments, and abuse victims seeking support. It also protects LGBTQ+ young people exploring their identities in environments where they may not feel safe doing so offline. Weakening anonymity in the name of safety risks undermining the very protections that vulnerable people rely upon every day.
Nor should Labour allow Big Tech to quietly reposition itself as a partner in solving a crisis it helped create. The real scandal is not that children use social media. The real scandal is that some of the wealthiest corporations in human history deliberately engineered platforms around addiction, outrage and behavioural manipulation because those systems generate extraordinary profit.
The algorithmic amplification of inflammatory content, alongside the endless notifications engineered to drag users back onto platforms, are not accidental flaws within otherwise healthy systems. These are deliberate design choices created to maximise engagement and harvest attention for advertising revenue.
Whistleblowers and former tech executives have repeatedly exposed how platforms consciously prioritised growth and engagement over user wellbeing, despite internal evidence showing the psychological harms their systems could produce, particularly for younger users. Yet, instead of focusing political pressure on dismantling these toxic business models, governments increasingly appear willing to shift responsibility onto individual users and parents.
Labour should resist the temptation of easy, headline-grabbing prohibition and instead focus its regulatory fire on the monopolistic platforms profiting directly from harm. That means curbing addictive design features aimed at children, as well as strengthening data protections and building a digital public square that serves the common good, not surveillance capitalism. It must invest seriously in digital literacy so that young people are properly equipped to navigate online spaces, rather than being made to avoid them altogether.
The Labour movement has historically been at its strongest when it challenged concentrations of unaccountable power, not in restricting the liberties of ordinary people. That principle should not disappear simply because the battleground has moved online.
A truly progressive digital politics would confront the structures driving genuine online harm while defending the rights and freedoms that remain essential to democratic life in the digital age.
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Charlie Davies is the founder of the Labour Digital Rights Network, an organisation that promotes discussion across the Labour movement on digital rights and technology policy. You can follow its work on X at @LabDRN. His wider interests include the relationship between democracy, security and political communication, particularly in an era of rising populism and rapid technological change.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
