Not All Right: What 29,000 European Kids Think of a Social Media Ban for Children

Ask an adult what a child fears online and you will hear about predators, pornography, the algorithm that won’t let go. Ask the children, and the answers come out differently. They express concerns that a social media ban for children might overlook.

A family member falling ill or dying. War reaching their lives. Whether they will get the job they want, or pass the exams that stand in the way of it. These are the worries that topped the list when researchers put the question to 29,169 young people across 19 European countries, and not one of them is the kind of thing a social media ban would touch.

The survey, from the EU Kids Online network, landed in an awkward week. On 15 June, Keir Starmer and his technology secretary Liz Kendall announced that Britain would block under-16s from TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and X, following the path Australia took last December, then going further still: bans on livestreaming, on contact from strangers, on romantic AI chatbots for anyone under 18. The policy was sold, in a phrase that has done a lot of work lately, as a way “to give kids their childhoods back”. Some 90 per cent of parents who responded to the consultation were said to back it.

Despite these fears, many young people believe that social media plays an important role in their lives, and they are not in favor of a social media ban for children.

The children, it turns out, were rather less enthusiastic. Asked directly whether a law requiring parental permission for under-16s would make them feel safer online, 45 per cent disagreed and only a third agreed. Nearly half (48 per cent) thought it would make it harder to stay in touch with friends. A similar share said it would strip away their own responsibility to decide things for themselves, and 45 per cent felt it would limit their freedom and rights. This is the uncomfortable bit for anyone framing a ban as protection: the people being protected experience it as something taken away.

The thing about a blunt instrument

What gives the survey its weight is how thoroughly social media has already woven itself into ordinary childhood. By age 15 or 16, having a profile is close to universal, 89 per cent across the six countries where children were asked, up from 70 per cent in the early teens and 34 per cent among nine to eleven-year-olds. Their single most frequent activity online is not doomscrolling or gaming. It is talking to their friends. After that, watching videos, listening to music, and messaging their parents. A ban would land squarely on the most mundane and arguably the most valuable uses.

And the harms that worry adults? They cluster, when they appear, among the older teenagers, the very group an under-16 line would leave exposed. Up to one in five children reported running into some form of problematic user-generated content, conspiracy theories most of all. But that content circulates everywhere, on forums, in messaging apps, across gaming chat and image boards, not only on the regulated platforms a ban would target. “An age limit may change when children reach these platforms, not what is waiting for them when they do,” says Holly Bear, a researcher at Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry. The wording is careful. The point is not.

Bear’s deeper worry is one the survey data underwrites. For some children, especially the most vulnerable, online spaces are where support and harm sit in the same room. The report found that children from poorer homes were more likely to go looking online for information about mental health and wellbeing, exactly the children who might lose most if the door were shut. “Harm and support often sit side by side in the same spaces,” Bear says, “which is why a blanket age ban is a blunt tool and a stronger step than the current evidence can support.”

What Australia already learned

There is also the small matter of whether a ban works at all. Australia switched its on in December, and by March its eSafety Commissioner could report that around 4.7 million age-restricted accounts had been removed. Impressive, until you read the next line: roughly 70 per cent of under-age children had simply kept their accounts. Some had not yet been asked to prove their age. Others, when asked, defeated the facial-estimation checks with an older sibling or, in a detail that feels almost cartoonish, a mask. Reports of harm to the Commissioner’s office had not noticeably fallen. “Banning under-16s from social media won’t stop determined teens from connecting online, but it will encourage them to break the rules or find new, riskier spaces,” says Victoria Nash of the Oxford Internet Institute, who notes the awkward timing of cutting teenagers off from news at the very moment Britain prepares to hand 16-year-olds the vote.

Among researchers the mood is less opposition than a kind of pained ambivalence. Amy Orben, who studies the developing brain at Cambridge and was recently appointed to a government advisory panel, captures it. A ban, she allows, can be defensible: “Banning something for those most vulnerable is a good step if it cannot be made safe.” But she reads the policy mainly as a confession. “By banning under 16s, we are constraining their rights to join in with this part of our digital society, because we have lost trust that we can make social media safer for us all at any acceptable rate. I feel a deep sense of disappointment about this.” Her colleague Sander van der Linden is blunter, arguing the move “disempowers young people and takes rights away from them, rather than keeping the focus on social media companies, their faulty products, and the need to fix and redesign the business model”.

None of this is an argument that the platforms are fine. Only about half the children surveyed said they feel safe online, and three-quarters no longer find other people kind or helpful there, a striking erosion since 2018. The disagreement is about where the lever sits. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, also at Cambridge, points out that the adolescent brain is poorly equipped to resist a feed engineered to be irresistible: “Even as adults, it is really hard to put our phones down if we are constantly seeing interesting things. As a child or an adolescent, whose pre-frontal cortex is developing, it is even harder.” The answer she and others reach for is not exclusion but design, the safety-by-design approach the EU Kids Online team argues is already half-written into Article 28 of the Digital Services Act, were anyone to enforce it.

A Wellcome-funded evaluation will eventually tell us whether Britain’s version helps, harms or does nothing much, and that evaluation, the researchers insist, should be built in from the start rather than bolted on once the law has passed. For now the survey leaves a question hanging over the whole enterprise. If two-thirds of European teenagers already live a good part of their social lives on these platforms, and the platforms close the front door, where exactly do the researchers imagine all those friendships will go? Onto messaging apps and games, less visible and less moderated, most likely. The children seem to know this already. It is the adults who keep being surprised.

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