Child safety or age-gating for all? UK social media ban plan draws fire

Open Rights Group says plans would create serious privacy risks

The UK government's proposed ban on under-16s using social media would amount to building a mass age-verification system for the entire internet, creating "serious risks to privacy, data protection, and freedom of expression," digital rights advocates have warned.

The government has opened a public consultation on ways to "drive action to improve children's relationship with mobile phones and social media," a broad-brush initiative that goes well beyond a simple age limit. Ministers are asking whether to restrict addictive platform features like infinite scroll, raise the digital age of consent, tighten enforcement of school phone bans, and, yes, consider blocking under-16s from major social platforms.

That consultation comes after weeks of increasingly loud calls in Westminster to tackle children's screen time with something more dramatic than another set of guidance notes. A group of 61 Labour backbench MPs published an open letter supporting a ban similar to the one in Australia on Monday, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer has signaled that, when it comes to online safety, "no option is off the table."

But that is precisely the angle that alarms the Open Rights Group (ORG). The civil liberties organization has warned that a ban would require platforms to verify age at scale, with all the privacy and security downsides that entails. Age gating at this level, ORG says, would drag millions of adults and older teens into proving their identity to private corporations simply to post, message, or read online, multiplying the data collection risks that already plague Big Tech.

"We already know these systems are risky," said James Baker, Platform Power and Free Expression programme manager at Open Rights Group. He pointed to last year's breach of sensitive age-verification data collected by Discord, a cautionary tale of how personal information can be exposed, misused, or repurposed.

Age-assurance technology is still lightly regulated in the UK, despite repeated warnings from rights groups. These systems often rely on identity documents, facial analysis, or inferred profiling that can have long-term consequences for privacy and security once collected, ORG argues. Even strong data protection laws offer little solace when the premise of a system is to gather more personal data, not less.

One of the Lords' amendments to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill would push the idea further than some ministers might have intended, potentially banning under-16s from social functions in online games, messaging services like WhatsApp, and even collaborative platforms like Wikipedia. "This goes far beyond Australia's experiment in banning under-16s from social media," ORG warned.

The government insists that it's not rushing to block kids from social media outright. Instead, the consultation sweeps up everything from endless scroll and school phone rules to a possible rethink of digital consent, with ministers repeatedly pointing back to the Online Safety Act.

For digital rights campaigners, that misses the point. They argue that the problem isn't young people existing online, but platforms designed to keep them hooked – and that banning under-16s risks hard-wiring surveillance into everyday internet use. ®