Banning all children from social media apps was this week’s simple, headline-grabbing solution to an online world growing more hostile by the day. Too bad it didn’t work in the end.
Not only is a blanket ban on social media incredibly difficult to enforce from a technical standpoint, but the consequences will hit everyone where it hurts the most: our digital privacy, and perhaps even ultimately taking down VPNs in the process.
Children and teenagers living in Australia were the first in the world to take a forced break from their lives on Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok – a break which, by law, must last until the age of 16. At least that’s the theory, but reality tells a very different story.
In March, Australia’s body responsible for overseeing the implementation of the youth social media ban, the e-Safety Commissioner, found that around seven in ten young people under the age of 16 still had an active account on major platforms. Worse, three months later, there has been no noticeable change in the cyberbullying or image-based abuse reported by children that this law was supposed to end.
The figures are not encouraging and show that radical restrictions are failing to produce the desired results. Nonetheless, the British government is confident that banning social media access to all under-16s “is the right move for Britain” and has set a deadline for implementing a model similar to Australia’s by spring next year.
Predictably, the privacy tech industry has sounded the alarm over the expansion of mandatory age verification checks, calling the proposal a “cybersecurity disaster waiting to happen.” Less expected, however, are the cries of resistance coming from child safety groups.
Speaking to TechRadar, Rowan Ferguson, head of policy at the Molly Rose Foundation – a non-profit set up by the father of the 14-year-old who died after seeing harmful content online – highlighted evidence from Australia, arguing that a ban on social media is instead likely to be a “step backwards” in protecting children online. He said:
“There is ample evidence that a ban is likely to disappear quickly, meaning a majority of children will be able to continue to have accounts on platforms that we know are currently very dangerous.”
So what does the Australian data really tell us? And if a social media ban doesn’t work, is there a better way to make children safer online without putting the privacy of all UK social media users at risk?
What the data tells us about Australia’s social media ban
Since December last year, the world’s first ban on teen social networks requires all “user-to-user platforms” to prevent under-16s from accessing their services. However, as we said, Australia’s e-safety commissioner found that most of them are still active on social media.
A large-scale survey of Australians aged 12 to 15 by the Molly Rose Foundation found similar results. Three-fifths of those surveyed continue to have access to one or more social media accounts.
Strikingly, more than half of participants surveyed said the coming into force of the ban had no effect on their online safety, and one in seven now feel even less safe.
As Ferguson of the Molly Rose Foundation points out, this trend doesn’t mean kids are great at bending the rules.
“This is more of a case of ‘malicious compliance’ on the part of big tech companies. They are simply not taking proactive steps to remove accounts of those under 16,” he told TechRadar.
How under-16s in Australia retained their access to social media
| Attribute | YouTube | Snapchat | TikTok | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No action taken | 64 | 61 | 60 | 60 |
| I bypassed age checks to continue using an existing account | 23 | 24 | 22 | 25 |
| Using a workaround to create a new account for those over 16 | 10 | 11 | 14 | 14 |
| Asked a friend or family member | 10 | 7 | 7 | 8 |
| I used a VPN | 4 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Other | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
I bypassed age checks to continue using an existing account (%)
Using a workaround to create a new account for those over 16 (%)
Question asked of a friend or family member (%)
Molly Rose Foundation data, March 2026 survey https://mollyrosefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/MRF_Australia-Social-Media-Ban-Research_Briefing-April-26.pdf
The results of the two studies show that the main reason why people under 16 are still active on social networks is that these platforms do not yet ask children to verify their age.
The Molly Rose Foundation survey even found that while 70% of kids who still use restricted sites say it was “easy” to get around the ban, only 4-5% of respondents use a virtual private network (VPN) or similar tool to do so.
These findings, along with similar studies by Internet Matters and ChildNet, shatter the narrative that under-16s are turning to VPN services to circumvent online safety rules.
Nonetheless, it is a belief that continues to proliferate among UK policymakers, who are expected to decide whether to also introduce age restrictions for VPN use next month.
How the UK’s social media ban on teenagers could be enforced
Details on how the UK’s social media ban policy for children will be enforced are scant so far, but it appears the onus of finding a workable process will fall primarily on the social media providers themselves.
According to the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, Ofcom, the country’s media regulator, has been tasked with sharing a list of age verification methods to prove whether someone is over 16 that are “accurate, robust, reliable and fair”. This is no easy task, as Ofcom itself has admitted.
In a letter to the department, Oliver Griffiths, Ofcom’s director of online safety, said checking that users are over 16 “should be technically feasible” but would prove more difficult than existing restrictions on over-18s under the Online Safety Act.
In Australia, social media platforms have a handful of methods, including government identity scans, facial or voice recognition, or so-called “age inference” checks.
The last of these uses an algorithm to analyze online behavior and interactions to estimate a person’s age. This might not be an option in the UK, however. Speaking to the Financial Times, Ofcom said there was no evidence to show that these models could provide an effective, privacy-preserving solution.
What are the risks of banning social media for teenagers?
Cybersecurity and child safety experts fear that a ban on social media for teenagers in the UK could actually create more problems than it solves.
According to the Molly Rose Foundation, for example, a ban could make it harder for children to speak out and disclose harm caused online.
“Our chairman, Ian Russell, is particularly concerned that if a child is subject to manipulation or sees harmful content on a platform they officially should not be on, they might be afraid to seek help because they could be penalized for being there,” Ferguson told TechRadar.
Skeptical about the effectiveness of the measure, the group also believes that the UK’s proposed policy will end up giving parents a “false sense of security” that the problem has been solved.
Many commentators, including digital rights groups like Open Rights Group and Article 19, also argue that a ban could lead social media platform providers to stop addressing their security issues altogether.
“A ban would reduce pressure on platforms to clean up their act and provide age-appropriate digital environments that respect the rights of children and everyone else,” said Chantal Joris, interim head of law and policy at ARTICLE 19.
Joris says the problem is not children’s access to social media, but “the toxic incentives and practices embedded in the platforms.”
And all this without taking into account the consequences for the privacy and security of all social media users, both adults and children.
Commenting on this point, Romain Digneaux, head of public policy at Proton, told TechRadar:
“We’re already seeing serious security issues emerge, like in the Discord case, where thousands of users’ personal data was stolen by hackers. And we all need to remember that there’s more to child age verification than child age verification. Child age verification is everyone’s age verification.”
Are there better alternatives than banning children from social media?
Criticism aside, experts on all sides agree that finding a solution to harm to children online is a priority. So, if it’s not a ban, what will happen?
For child safety groups, it is necessary to make platforms safer by design.
“By safety by design, we mean an end to harmful and addictive design choices that evidence shows are leading drivers of online harm to children. In particular, we call for a conditional ban on harmful recommendation algorithms unless platforms meet strict safety requirements,” Ferguson of the Molly Rose Foundation told TechRadar.
Recent research by the Molly Rose Foundation shows that 47% of girls have seen harmful content about suicide, self-harm, depression or eating disorders in the past week, mainly through algorithmic recommendations.
Experts also believe that parents should have better parental controls and, at the same time, children should learn to effectively manage potential risks.
As Laura Tyrylyte, privacy advocate at NordVPN, told TechRadar: “The most effective approach will likely be a multi-tiered approach combining strong parental controls, improved digital literacy, responsible action by platforms, and privacy-preserving age-guarantee mechanisms at the device level.” »
The UK government guarantees that a ban on social media for under-16s is what 9 in 10 parents asked for in its online safety consultation. But would these parents feel the same way if they knew that, like in Australia, there’s a good chance it won’t work?
It is understandable that a faltering British administration took the opportunity to grab headlines to make a bold decision in favor of a cause that most people could support, but in its haste to do so it appears to have overlooked the data that points in the opposite direction.
As Ferguson told TechRadar, if we really want to fix the Internet, “we shouldn’t take the easy way out; we need to follow the evidence.”
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