Banning The Symptom: The Algorithm Built Not To Be Understood

This is Part One of three on the under-sixteen social media ban: how we got here, whether it is right and what comes next.

On The Podium

It began on a Monday morning, outside Downing Street. Keir Starmer stood at a podium and announced that children under sixteen will be barred from Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. He was not prepared, he said, to compromise on the “safety and happiness of our children”. His government called it giving children their childhood back.¹

Happiness is the word to stop and think about.

Starmer offers these words as though we are all bound to agree with what it means. Ask the children, however, and many would point straight at the screen. That is where their friends are, their banter, their standing, their belonging. The research supporting a ban isn’t convincing. Ofcom found that 99 per cent of thirteen to seventeen-year-olds report some benefit from being online.² One study which messaged teenagers throughout the day found that after a passive scroll, 46 per cent felt better, 44 per cent felt no different and only one in ten felt worse.³ The screen is not a simple poison. For a great many children, on a great many days, it is company.

Credit Where Credit’s Due

Banning something this woven into daily life is a controversial and drastic act, and the government was pushed to it by grieving parents and worn-out teachers who have asked for years. The general public is on their side. A YouGov poll in December found 74 per cent supported the principle of a ban, months before Starmer reached the podium.⁴

However, a ban arriving in 2026 is seeking to address a world which was built in 2006 and has developed and expanded enormously since then. Facebook opened to the public on 26 September 2006. Twitter had gone public in the July of that year. That October, Google paid a fortune for a fast-growing video site called YouTube.⁵ The mood was of wonder, not warning. Where were the warnings? Here instant connection was offered without distance, a printing press in every pocket, the promise that no one need be lonely again. Parents didn’t understand it. It was cool. Nobody stood at a lectern predicting what it would do to a generation, because nobody really knew.

Toys Turned Into Tools

The tools of 2006 were mere toys compared with what a child can access now. The leap has been vast: messages built to delete themselves, cameras of near-broadcast quality, a handset that can film a football match and stream it live to strangers. The platforms have learned. They have got faster, stickier, harder to look away from, and much harder to police. And they are still developing, in quantum leaps, thanks to ever-accelerating AI…

What about schools? The claim that children were taught nothing about social media and the digital world is not quite fair, though the truth is barely more comforting. Online safety became a compulsory part of the English curriculum only in 2020, tucked inside relationships and health lessons, often shrunk to the basics of passwords and stranger-danger. The updated stronger RSHE guidance does not take effect until September 2026, almost twenty years after Facebook threw open the gates.⁶ Teachers raised on chalk and exercise books were asked to guide pupils through a world they had never lived in. The children scrolled in the dark and their parents could not see what they were looking at.

The Evidence Piled Up

By the time the state stirred from its slumber, the figures were impossible to miss. Two in five children under thirteen already have a social media profile, despite thirteen being the platforms’ own stated minimum age. Among thirteen to fifteen-year-olds, 95 per cent are on it.⁷ Over the same years, the mental health of the young deteriorated: in 2017, around one in nine children aged eight to sixteen had a probable mental disorder; by 2023 it was one in five, with recorded eating disorders among older teenagers rising sharply.⁸

Whether the digital world caused that decline is the question these pieces will keep pressing, and the honest answer, for now, is that we do not fully know. There are so many factors, and society – and technology – has been changing at such a fast pace. What is beyond doubt is that certain children have been harmed, and publicly named. In 2022 a coroner ruled that fourteen-year-old Molly Russell died from an act of self-harm while suffering, in his words, “the negative effects of online content”, material an algorithm had served her without her ever asking for it. The NSPCC called it social media’s Big Tobacco moment.⁹

Twenty Years Of Warnings

This is the shape of the thing. React, not proact. Two decades of warnings, inquests and select committee reports, and a response only once the politics of general public opinion became unavoidable. Australia moved first, barring under-sixteens in December 2025 and threatening the platforms with fines of up to fifty million dollars, the stated aim being to give children time to grow up before the feed took hold.¹⁰ Britain has followed, with Starmer claiming his version reaches slightly further.

Whether it works to prevent the cases of personal harm is a separate question from whether it is welcome. A 2026 review of every experiment ever run on restricting social media found that not one had included a single person under the age of sixteen, the precise group these laws are written for. Three months into the Australian ban, by those same researchers’ account, close to 70 per cent of under-sixteen accounts were still live.¹¹ The accounts are still open, but the children are still scrolling. Forbidding a thing is not the same as stopping it.

The Contradiction No Minister Will Address

None of which makes the ban wrong. You do not always wait for perfect proof before acting on a serious risk, and the platforms’ own age limit of thirteen was a fiction no one bothered to enforce. Reasonable people stand on both sides of this, and they will be standing there for some time.

There is one huge contradiction, though, which no minister will address. The same government barring under-sixteens from the main arena of public argument is also legislating to hand sixteen-year-olds the vote.¹² Either a sixteen-year-old is grown enough to help choose a government, with the same access to information as every other voter, or they are not. Particularly so in an age when politics is increasingly moving to online messaging and campaigning.

The next piece takes up that question: the child banned on a Monday who turns sixteen on the Tuesday and whether school has taught them anything useful at all. The last piece asks what comes after social media, when the algorithms learn to answer back. React, not proact. We may be about to do it again.

References

By Neil Wolstenholme, Kloodle Chairman

1. Prime Minister’s announcement of the under-sixteen social media ban and remarks at Downing Street, June 2026 (gov.uk; reported by ABC News and others).
2. Ofcom, children’s media use and attitudes research, 2025.
3. Beyens, I., et al., real-time study of adolescents’ social media use and well-being, Scientific Reports, 2020.
4. YouGov, polling on a proposed under-sixteen social media ban, December 2025.
5. Platform launch dates: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, 2006 (Cybercultural; First Versions).
6. Department for Education, updated Relationships, Sex and Health Education statutory guidance (2025), in force September 2026.
7. Ofcom, children’s media use research, 2025, cited in House of Commons Library briefing on proposals to restrict social media for children.
8. NHS England, Mental Health of Children and Young People in England surveys, 2017 and 2023.
9. Inquest into the death of Molly Russell, North London Coroner’s Court, 2022; NSPCC.
10. Australian eSafety Commissioner; Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) legislation, in force December 2025.
11. Neff Lind, M., et al., guest editorial, Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 2026.
12. Legislation to lower the voting age to sixteen, 2026; see also S. Bush, Financial Times, June 2026.