Keir Starmer set to ban under-16s from social media
Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the UK will ban under-16s from major social media platforms, bar children from livestreaming on so-called "safer" sites, and stop them from talking to strangers on gaming apps. The government says the measures will roll out in 2027 and presented bereaved families on BBC Breakfast to underline the child-protection case. Campaigners and commentators warn the ban could cut teenagers off from educational tutorials, creative communities and civic information, while ministers say the policy will give children their childhoods back.
Merits of the under 16 ban aside, I still can’t believe that the plans to introduce a social media curfew for 16-17 year olds. At the risk of sounding ancient, at that age I was out at clubs & gigs in London and driving like a lunatic around Kent. And Starmer would stop my kid from watching Twitch?
Ben Ansell43It is, to use an apt word, infantilising.
Adam Brown24The best thing about the policy is that it is entirely unenforceable. The worst thing is that it's another wasted 12 months at least without doing anything more meaningful
Will Jennings📉🗳️12And look how you turned out!
D.Moore11Granting under 18's the right to vote then pissing them all off ensuring that they will never vote Labour. Possibly the most Starmer thing ever.
Andrew Whiteley7My experience with teenagers has been somewhat limited since my children left home, but in my experience they will always find a way around things like bans, age limits and inconvenient rules. If Starmer thinks he's going to keep 16 year olds off social media he's even dumber than I thought.
I have no intention of enforcing that. If my 16 and 12 yr old find ways around the ban I could’ve give a fuck. It’s ridiculous. Prohibition like this never works.
john5I guess it will be like the old days, where you'd celebrate your 18th birthday in your regular and the landlord would grumble about you're taking the piss, having been drinking in there for 2 years. Except it will be 4 year old twitch channels where the streamer is celebrating turning 18 on them.
Nick Marshall3Anything to curtail the amount of Green Party social content they consume I guess.
Indy3To me the most crackers bit is the "curfew" bit. At least a ban would be semi-coherent as an authoritarian move. But this is just bizarre. "It's fine so long as the sun is up." ??? (Also, so many people defending it as if it is a ban.)
It's much easier to follow rules that make sense. I was happy to wear a mask on the bus when people were dying of Coronavirus and we hadn't had vaccines. But refused when everyone was double or triple vaccinated and they tried to bring masks back for omicron which was a much milder variant.
Gavin Jackson2Maybe the hope is that your kid will get out to clubs and gigs in London instead of watching Twitch
sky2b.bsky.social2We need a social media ban for over 16s. They're the one's who are wrecking the world.
What is it Starmer thinks kids will *do* instead of spending that time on social media? Because last I checked we were a bit short on accessible and welcoming youth spaces and activities
Antony 'Dop' Shepherd23"...doing their homework, reading, playing with their friends outside, going to bed at decent hour." Oh yeah, playing with their friends in streets full of ginormous wankpanzers whose drivers can't see anything lower than their bonnet lid.
Maddie (delicious, nutritious)19The same thing Starmer does at night when he's run out of things to do: stand quietly in the corner for six to eight hours staring into the distance until the sun rises.
Nick Reed12Also, the one thing Facebook pearl-clutchers dislike more then the idea of screen-addicted children is children doing anything at all outside anywhere near them.
Charles11I work for a charity which uses social media specifically to *run* an accessible and welcoming youth space for autistic kids. Dude doesn’t care about the practicalities, it’s all optics and headlines
Nick 🐙5He (well, whoever is advising him) just lives in an absolute fantasy world. It's grim.
how it goes...5People seem not to fathom that the actual goal here IS to RUIN the lives of the most vulnerable kids like trans youth. This was NEVER about protecting KIDS. Then you have the aspect of seriously, UK is just sprinting toward dystopian-level surveilance. it really is that the HARM IS the actual POINT.
loucooks.bsky.social4Well we could go back to doing what I did which was hanging round bus stops/school grounds/bandstands drinking illegally acquired booze, smoking and committing small vandalisms. Much more healthy. When is he banning the over 70s btw?
Sam Turner4They'll chew each mouthful of food thirty times then hold reading and vaping groups outside the boarded up youth centre.
quitedo4Glue sniffing and slashing car tyres?
TG3My hope is that parents or older kids will start organising demanding them. Social media is a particular type of space and activity which has its place in life, but shouldn't replace everything else life has to offer.
Ali3Millenials were the last generation to grow up without social media. Things we used to do - Drink 2ltr of cider in the park. Graffiti the bandstand. Underaged sex. Make crank calls. We were a nightmare compared to teenagers these days, & we still had youth clubs! This should be fun to watch!!
Rosie 🏳️⚧️🏴 🎨 Artist 🖋️ Author2If the kids are smart, they will constantly beg for attention from their parents and make themselves such an annoying nuisance that the people who pushed for this will beg for it to stop. I say this as a parent.
Josephine Jellybean2They'll have a cup of tea and an early night just like he did as a boy
Debs_Delightful 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵2Has Starmer actually visited a council estate around midnight ? It’s when the youth come out to play
If Keir Starmer leads Labour into the next general election*, a seventeen year old will not be able to use YouTube to watch party political broadcasts and their screen would cut out half an hour into the debates, but they can vote in the election afterwards. *He won't but bear with me
Will Cooling12The whole just doesn't make any sense - how is policy like this getting through? I mean here's another example
Ed Morrish7i’m not 100% convinced this will make their vote less informed
Ian Boucher5I really like the policy it’s just as a parent I think content becomes harmful at 8.35 not 8.30. So hopefully they will adjust this to let them have those 5 minutes back before the harmful content becomes harmful.
Martin Kimber5@stephenkb.bsky.social my kids have both used YouTube educationally for most of their secondary school time. Languages, science experiments, music, specifically given YouTube links by teachers to consume the content as part of homework. They often would not have finished their homework by 20.30 […]
Tom Adams2But they will? On a family or shared device, or using a family YouTube account with visibility. I absolutely am not saying that this is perfect, and the curfew is definitely weird, but the idea that limiting access from a child's account means limiting access absolutely isn't accurate.
UK will ban social media for children under the age of 16 🇬🇧 The rollout is planned for 2027
Mike Vincent56I think a ban for white men over the age of 45 in the UK would be more beneficial
John26So once again Parents who don’t want to parent get the government to do it for them, what a shocker.
Jake 🏳️🌈19They are banning youtube as well which i believe to be insane as I used it to learn how to tie my shoe laces growing up
Escarietson9Nepal tried this before and their government got overthrown afterwards.
Digi6I thought they already did that.
SteveIsDamaged 5Porn in shoeboxes under beds is about to make such an incredible comeback.
Herzatz Fish4They are afraid and hate the youth and they also want to control Internet.
David3yeah they won't lmao , i mean look at trump imo and what he said about tiktok
Killertortoise12I'm pro banning it for children but think it should be done through strict parental controls. Parents should have to set up kids phones and boot into a kids mode where they can only acess kids versions of apps and it's linked to the parents phone.
Armageddon Speaking2learn about preston manning for all this idu stephen harper shiit
A discussion about the social media ban on under 16s. BBC: “You’re gong to have a lot more time to fill. What will you do?” Student: “Stare at a wall.”
Matthew Williams16The Government are going to introduce this, but are they opening new areas for kids to enjoy? Are they encouraging better moderation of online games to support kids e.g. Roblox? Are they teaching people that the increased numbers of kids hanging around town are not a threat?
The old man and the THC14She's not stupid enough to say i"'ve already got a vpn" on camera...
Scott Bryan12This exchange gives me so much hope for the next generation.
Jen Hicken8This will be the teenagers' ultimate revenge against authoritarian crackdowns: just simply refusing to do anything productive with all the time they would have spent online, purely out of spite. They are already cleverer than the government.
Heidi Peeps5They will end up like me & my fellow Gen X’s hanging around off-licences waiting for the local bag head to come along to buy a bottle of cider for them for entertainment because there as been nothing for the kids to do for the past 40 years.
I am banning children under 16 from slamming doors and also i am criminalising shouting after 10.30pm. Thank god I am the only person who has noticed how prevalent this destructive behaviour has become and will take clear and decisive action.
Janine Gibson62Oh I should also like to ban my 20 year old from making a character in her computer game called "janine" who makes very bad decisions and is therefore an endless source of taking the piss. Do an amendment
Tony Yates17I also think we should give serious consideration to legislating against kids ordering too much food and then leaving it.
Helene von Bismarck7You forgot shouting before 9 am
The Crusader Project4How about sending 8-year olds down chimneys again to teach them manners and proper work ethic?
Malcolm Reed2Me, yelling at 10:29 pm "WHAT TIME IS IT, JANINE?"
Teacherinrecovery2I have also banned slinging your school bag on the floor in the hall, leaving festering glassware around the house, ooh, and eye-rolling when asked to help with the washing up- easy!
Breaking News: The U.K. government will ban social media for children under 16, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said.
Gonzalo Fernández Gómez21If the British government wants a healthier social media landscape, it should start by immediately leaving X and deleting all its accounts in that openly manipulated white‑supremacist shithole.
Nico ↙️↙️↙️11This type of policies is a failure in Australia, it will also be a failure in Canada and the UK as well…
Moi8what it means is that everyone in the UK will have to give ID to use these sites, not just children.
Yung Dolma3This labour party keeps doing tory things but will not be thanked by the fascists they're trying to appeal to.
La Jazmine2We (the USA) needs to ban it for EVERYONE! It's extremely toxic and no longer what it once was.
there goes every cool and informative drawing tutorial which has made kids *profoundly* better than I was at their age. there goes every play along piano tutorial, which miniboyd's music teacher often points them to. keir starmer is a sentient ham sandwich running a government full of clowns
Barbarossa⚡️3Honestly I don’t understand why YouTube is on this list and not Discord.
Ghost Coast.3My nephews live outside the UK - so they're not affected by this - but I'm thinking about how the older one (13) loves to play the electric and acoustic guitar, and loves to draw. YouTube in particular has been so incredibly helpful for him in this regard.
Chris Kendall2except of course it won’t, it will simply make our kids better at circumventing online controls
Joining the chorus of disapproval for the under-16s social media ban. There *is* unhealthy usage and ill-effects in this age group, but this is the equivalent of dealing with school shootings by banning children from schools. Fix the platforms. They are poisoning *everyone*'s minds in the same way.
Duncan Hothersall19And, if I may bang the drum once again, there is a golden opportunity right now for the government to take concrete action against the worst offender and that is to take all official government (and Labour Party) accounts off X, which would encourage other parties and the media to leave too.
Willie Mackenzie3The fact that the UK Govt still uses X for example … well, it’s not much of an example.
David Thompson2I agree, the near total lack of any regulation of the social media platforms is at the heart of the problem & that needs to be addressed. There's an unwillingness to do so for fear of triggering Trump I suspect, but that is a risk with taking. He'll be gone soon & is a bit of a busted flush anyhow.
PM Starmer: We are banning social media access for under 16s. These days kids must find their feet in a world where technology intrudes into every area of their life. I just can’t let that go on anymore. So we’re giving children their childhoods back.
Iain7Announced in full on the toxic fake news bin-fire site of 'X' which if he really cared about protecting children, he would ban...
Frogzombie5Genie and bottle comes to mind
รℓσαɳε ℓყรɓεƭɦ 🏳️🌈4he's such a dangerous cretin.
Dr Emu, Graham Pringle, PhD3In Australia, our experience is that if a kid wants to find a way around the controls, they will and can The ban will only be followed by those already inclined to obey Here, the results are inconclusive, with no demonstrated benefits, so it is a great idea to adopt the same policy
Wudang96 💖🌻3This is not go to turn out the way they think. Were they never teenagers? 😭 🤣😁🙈
Walter Paisley2What's next? Kids reading books? God forbids!!!
Jockyfox2It’s not the kids who are the problem It’s the middle aged Neanderthal thickos who dont like black and brown people - and those who wind them up … @natashadevon.bsky.social
Brian L028 🏴 🇪🇺2It’s a hotly contentious issue but his argument makes no sense. Technology is everywhere and so we must keep kids away from it. Excellent preparation for the future?
Indystitcher 🏴🇬🇱🇩🇰2Why does he not tackle the owners of these social media sites instead? These owners control everything on their sites, and can clean them up if they wanted to.