Three in five Australian children aged 12-15 still access social media accounts that should have been blocked by their under-16 ban. That’s the number UK policymakers should be staring at today.
Tomorrow, Prime Minister Keir Starmer will announce a ban on under-16s using TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, and Reddit. The UK goes further than Australia by explicitly including romantic or sexual AI chatbots and imposing a daily usage limit and curfew for older teenagers. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy called the ban “not a silver bullet” but part of a “basket of measures” - a phrase she repeated twice on the BBC this morning.
Australia’s 60% Bypass Rate Haunts UK’s New Ban
The government’s consultation drew 116,000 responses - the second-largest in UK history after equal marriage in 2012. Nandy acknowledged that enforcement is the weak link. Australia’s ban, imposed in December, relied on weak age verification, and polling published in April found 60% of kids in the targeted age group still held accounts by using VPNs or fake birth dates. Nandy told Laura Kuenssberg: “The experience in Australia showed part of the reason why it has been difficult for them to enforce it is because there weren’t very tough age verification measures. That’s one of the things we’re looking at.”
No specifics on what tougher verification looks like yet. Starmer is expected to detail that tomorrow. The bet is that stronger identity checks - possibly tied to official ID or device-level controls - can shrink that bypass rate. History suggests otherwise: every age gate deployed at scale gets cracked within weeks.
Trust in Government Lags Behind Parents and Regulators
An IPPR/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults puts the challenge in numbers. Only 15% trust government ministers to decide which platforms are appropriate for children. Parents get 51% trust, an independent regulator gets 49%, schools 22%, and tech companies 16%. That’s a credibility gap: the party enforcing the ban is the least trusted to pick the platforms.
The National Education Union’s Daniel Kebede backed a full ban, saying “anything less would mean caving in to Big Tech.” The IPPR is also pushing for a blanket ban, arguing that childhood itself is being lost to algorithms. Avnee Morjaria, former teacher and IPPR associate director, put it bluntly: “The greatest loss of the smartphone age is not privacy; it’s childhood itself.”
Tomorrow’s announcement will shift the Overton window on age-based platform restrictions. The hard part - building enforcement that actually works - starts after the press conference.
Source: UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s
Domain: manchestereveningnews.co.uk
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