The Government has announced a three-month consultation on children's social media use, examining options that include a minimum age for access, stronger age verification, raising the digital age of consent from 13 and restrictions on addictive design features like infinite scrolling. It is a direction of travel I welcome.
Having spent the better part of a decade working on online safety – first as the Secretary of State who introduced the original online harms White Paper in 2019, and subsequently scrutinising the Online Safety Act's passage and implementation – I have consistently argued that children are not adequately protected online, and the evidence confirms it. Ofcom data shows that 37% of three to five year olds are already using social media. The current position cannot be defended.
I support raising the age at which children can access social media, and I also support raising the digital age of consent beyond 13. Children should not be processing data agreements with platforms before they are equipped to understand what they are agreeing to.
But I want to be clear that a ban, however welcome, is not the whole answer, and we should be careful that it does not become an excuse for the Government or Ofcom to do less elsewhere. I have previously highlighted the extent to which the Online Safety Act already gives Ofcom the tools to act on harmful algorithmic design – the features that draw children towards increasingly dark content and make it almost impossible to stop scrolling. The regulator has shown a troubling reluctance to use those powers to their full extent, and a social media ban must not allow that reluctance to go unchallenged, or worse, become more entrenched.
There are also important questions of definition. Social media covers an enormous range of platforms and services, and we must be precise about what falls within scope. We must equally ensure that wherever the age limit is drawn, the child safety duties that platforms carry under the Online Safety Act are not quietly diluted in response. The consultation is a genuinely welcome step forward, but it is the quality and ambition of what follows that will determine whether children are meaningfully better protected.
