Britain is considering banning social media for children. How did it get here?

Two years ago, when Daisy Greenwell and a group of British parents first met to share concerns about the risks their children face online, the government made it clear, saying it was not interested in passing new laws on the issue.

“It always felt like a long way to go,” said Ms Greenwell, founder of UK charity Smartphone Free Childhood. “But then the political winds changed.

Now Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government is considering whether to introduce a ban on social media platforms for under-16s as public opinion in Britain coalesces around the idea that more needs to be done to keep children safe online.

Mr Starmer said last week that the question was not whether his government would act, but what it would do, and that a decision would come “very quickly”. Here’s how Britain got here.

Some protections exist, but advocates say they don’t go far enough.

When the current Labor government was elected to office in 2024, it said it had no plans to restrict social media for children or ban phones in schools.

The previous Conservative-led government already passed a broad law in 2023, the Online Safety Act, which regulates harmful content. The country’s media and internet authority, known as Ofcom, enforces these regulations and can fine or prosecute tech companies that don’t comply.

Critics say the law has failed to ensure children’s safety.

Sonia Livingstone, a professor at the London School of Economics who studies children’s digital rights, said that while Britain had worked to create thoughtful online safety legislation for many years, enforcement was a major problem.

She said the Online Safety Act was “significant, likely to change the internet and children’s experiences for the better, but also extremely slow and cumbersome”.

“So it was a really long process,” she said, “and too long for the public to bear.”

This year, OfcomUK regulator, asked platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to do more to protect children. It reported in May that companies were still not enforcing minimum age rules.

Senior police officials have warned that the design of social media, messaging apps and gaming platforms allows pedophiles to target children on a mass scale, and that young people have been forced to share nude images and videos and then blackmailed.

Algorithms also pushed children content that glorified self-harm and extreme violence, police said. In some cases, children have been radicalized or forced into violence.

Public pressure on government action increased.

As support for age limits has grown on social media in recent months, pressure has mounted on the government to act. One YouGov survey found that 74 percent of Britons support a ban on social media for children under 16.

Mr. Starmer met with the creators from the TV series ‘Adolescence’ last March after becoming British most watched a show in which a schoolboy is accused of murder after being subjected to online misogyny. After the meeting, the government said it was “committed to listening and will not hesitate to further strengthen the law where necessary”.

In December, Australia banned social media for under-16s. Kemi Badenochleader of the British opposition Conservative Party, he promised to follow suit if her party were elected to government.

Mr Starmer’s government signaled it was open to changing its position when it called for public input on children’s online safety in March this year. The government said it would publish an analysis of the responses in the summer of 2026.

Speaking at a London technology conference on Monday, Mr Starmer announced that unless technology companies operating in Britain put in place controls to prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images, the law would change. The government said the companies had three months to act or face fines and said it was considering criminal liability for leaders who failed to comply.

The US Embassy in Britain said it considered the matter during a call for public input and said it did not support a ban, noting that it opposed “imposing blanket restrictions on content or imposing specific design choices” and opposed “inadvertent regulatory tools”.

Many parents and top police officials believe in banning social media for children.

Smartphone Free Childhood has seen interest from parents in the past year, Ms Greenwell said. Many believe the Australian ban offered a model, she said. “That suddenly meant we could actually do something about it,” she said, “and that these tech companies weren’t too big to regulate.”

Not all parents agree with the ban. Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly was 14 when she took her own life in 2017 after viewing suicide and self-harm content, has long campaigned for online safety. But referring to a rule in the Online Safety Act that tech companies must protect inappropriate content from children, he said the ban would “drop social media platforms by weakening the requirement that they offer safe, high-quality experiences as a prerequisite for operating in the UK”.

“Banning is the wrong answer to a fundamental question,” he said in a statement, adding that Mr Starmer should instead strengthen existing regulations.

The National Crime Agency, which is responsible for tackling serious crime in Britain, and the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which coordinates policing nationally, recommended last month that online platforms that cannot guarantee the safety of children should be banned from under-16s.

“In every other area of ​​everyday life, there are laws and safeguards in place to protect children,” said Gavin Stephens, chairman of the National Council of Chiefs of Police. “And yet the online space remains something of a Wild West, where legislation and regulation have failed to keep up with the pace of technology.”

Some online safety experts warn that the ban could be ineffective.

Victoria Nash, senior lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute said some young people could benefit greatly from using safe social media spaces to connect with peers or support groups.

However, she said she believed the ban was unlikely to be effective. She pointed to the results of one online survey of 1,050 young people in Australia, indicating that more than 60 percent of people under the age of 16 still use their social media accounts.

She said enforcing existing laws and holding tech companies accountable for security would be more effective. The ban, she said, “seems like a very blunt tool that offers a fairly significant opportunity cost.”