The Ban That Made Parents Know Less
Britain is about to ban social media for under-16s, with nine in ten parents behind it. Australia got there first, and three months in one number had moved in the wrong direction: the share of parents who had no idea their child was still using it.
Asked by the government this year whether under-16s should be kept off social media, nine in ten parents said yes. The government agreed. The regulations are due to be written by December, and a ban on selected platforms is expected to be in force by spring 2027.
Australia did it first, on 10 December 2025. Which means that for once the argument is not hypothetical. Somebody else has run the experiment, and the first results are in.
Three months after the Australian law started, researchers surveyed 803 children aged 10 to 15 along with their parents. Several of the numbers moved roughly the way you would hope. One moved the other way, and it is the one worth sitting with. The share of parents who had no idea their child had used social media in the past four weeks rose from 23 per cent to 33 per cent.
Then you look at whether the children were still getting on. Three months in, 81.5 per cent of them were, down only about four points. A separate study from the University of Newcastle followed teenagers before and after the law and found more than 85 per cent still using restricted platforms, with no meaningful fall in the time they spent there. Use among 14 and 15 year olds dipped a little. That was about the extent of it.
The how is not mysterious. A sibling's login, a friend's account, a parent's phone, a fresh sign-up with an invented birthday, a VPN. Two-thirds of the children had come up against an age check at some point. Ofcom, which will have to make our version stick, published a report in July on age checking and was honest about the ceiling: four methods can be highly effective at 16, including photo ID, bank checks and facial age estimation, and not one of them is beyond a motivated 14-year-old.
A team at the University of Manchester followed more than 25,000 young people aged 11 to 14 across three school years as part of the #BeeWell programme. They found no evidence that heavier social media use or frequent gaming led to more anxiety or depression a year later, for boys or for girls. They checked whether it mattered if a teenager was chatting or silently scrolling. The picture barely shifted. If anything the arrow pointed the other way: how a young person is feeling shapes what they do with their phone, more reliably than the phone shapes the feeling.
In May, a large group of researchers published a blunt statement that we cannot ban our way out of a youth mental health crisis. Their sharpest point was a gap in the evidence. No experiment that cuts people off from social media and measures what happens next has ever included anyone under 16. The policy that nine in ten parents want is built almost entirely on studies of adults.
None of which means the worry was invented. Ofcom's research keeps finding that something like a third of British teenagers come across suicide, self-harm or eating disorder material in an ordinary week, and closer to half of teenage girls. That is a problem about what the feed chooses to show a 13-year-old at eleven at night. It is not the same problem as how many minutes she spent there. A ban measures the minutes and hopes the rest follows.
Before the law, a 14-year-old's Instagram account was a slightly uncomfortable fact of family life. You knew about it. You could ask who she was talking to, insist on seeing it now and then, make the occasional unpopular ruling. After the law, the account still exists, but it is contraband. It lives on a borrowed login under a name you have never heard.
And if something goes wrong on it, a message from a stranger, a photo passed around, a group that has turned nasty, she now has to confess to breaking a national rule in order to tell you. That extra step is small and it is not free. The third of Australian parents who had stopped knowing is what it looks like when measured.
There is a second wrinkle that child protection groups have been pointing at. A ban creates a sharp edge at 16. A young person who has spent three years quietly dodging age checks arrives at their birthday with full access and no practice, having learnt about privacy settings and strangers and screenshots from nobody in particular.
The ban is coming either way. It may well do some good, and closing four and a half million accounts is not nothing. But it is a blunt tool aimed at a target we have not measured properly, and it will land in houses where the harder work was never legislative.
So the question for the next eighteen months probably isn't whether the law will hold. It is whether, when the rules change, our children carry on telling us things. A password can be guessed and an age check can be fooled. Being the person a 14-year-old comes to first, before she has worked out how much trouble she is in, has never been something a regulator could hand us.
Australia did it first, on 10 December 2025. Which means that for once the argument is not hypothetical. Somebody else has run the experiment, and the first results are in.
Three months after the Australian law started, researchers surveyed 803 children aged 10 to 15 along with their parents. Several of the numbers moved roughly the way you would hope. One moved the other way, and it is the one worth sitting with. The share of parents who had no idea their child had used social media in the past four weeks rose from 23 per cent to 33 per cent.
The accounts went. The children didn't.
The platforms did comply, up to a point. Around 4.7 million accounts belonging to Australians under 16 were closed. Among 10 to 15 year olds, the proportion holding an account on a restricted service fell from 52 per cent to 42 per cent. That is a real change, and on paper it looks like a policy working.Then you look at whether the children were still getting on. Three months in, 81.5 per cent of them were, down only about four points. A separate study from the University of Newcastle followed teenagers before and after the law and found more than 85 per cent still using restricted platforms, with no meaningful fall in the time they spent there. Use among 14 and 15 year olds dipped a little. That was about the extent of it.
The how is not mysterious. A sibling's login, a friend's account, a parent's phone, a fresh sign-up with an invented birthday, a VPN. Two-thirds of the children had come up against an age check at some point. Ofcom, which will have to make our version stick, published a report in July on age checking and was honest about the ceiling: four methods can be highly effective at 16, including photo ID, bank checks and facial age estimation, and not one of them is beyond a motivated 14-year-old.
The clock was probably the wrong thing to measure
Underneath all this sits a question that gets asked less than it should. What exactly are we expecting the hours back to buy?A team at the University of Manchester followed more than 25,000 young people aged 11 to 14 across three school years as part of the #BeeWell programme. They found no evidence that heavier social media use or frequent gaming led to more anxiety or depression a year later, for boys or for girls. They checked whether it mattered if a teenager was chatting or silently scrolling. The picture barely shifted. If anything the arrow pointed the other way: how a young person is feeling shapes what they do with their phone, more reliably than the phone shapes the feeling.
In May, a large group of researchers published a blunt statement that we cannot ban our way out of a youth mental health crisis. Their sharpest point was a gap in the evidence. No experiment that cuts people off from social media and measures what happens next has ever included anyone under 16. The policy that nine in ten parents want is built almost entirely on studies of adults.
None of which means the worry was invented. Ofcom's research keeps finding that something like a third of British teenagers come across suicide, self-harm or eating disorder material in an ordinary week, and closer to half of teenage girls. That is a problem about what the feed chooses to show a 13-year-old at eleven at night. It is not the same problem as how many minutes she spent there. A ban measures the minutes and hopes the rest follows.
What we might actually be trading away
Think about what the Australian figures mean on a Tuesday evening in an ordinary kitchen.Before the law, a 14-year-old's Instagram account was a slightly uncomfortable fact of family life. You knew about it. You could ask who she was talking to, insist on seeing it now and then, make the occasional unpopular ruling. After the law, the account still exists, but it is contraband. It lives on a borrowed login under a name you have never heard.
And if something goes wrong on it, a message from a stranger, a photo passed around, a group that has turned nasty, she now has to confess to breaking a national rule in order to tell you. That extra step is small and it is not free. The third of Australian parents who had stopped knowing is what it looks like when measured.
There is a second wrinkle that child protection groups have been pointing at. A ban creates a sharp edge at 16. A young person who has spent three years quietly dodging age checks arrives at their birthday with full access and no practice, having learnt about privacy settings and strangers and screenshots from nobody in particular.
The ban is coming either way. It may well do some good, and closing four and a half million accounts is not nothing. But it is a blunt tool aimed at a target we have not measured properly, and it will land in houses where the harder work was never legislative.
So the question for the next eighteen months probably isn't whether the law will hold. It is whether, when the rules change, our children carry on telling us things. A password can be guessed and an age check can be fooled. Being the person a 14-year-old comes to first, before she has worked out how much trouble she is in, has never been something a regulator could hand us.
Sources & Further Reading