Proposals to “ban” under-16s from social media should be opposed. (A consultation on doing so has recently been announced.)

This policy would be a serious mistake – undermining parental responsibility, civil liberties, child safety, and democratic accountability, while being unworkable in practice. Five reasons why:

1) This is a decision for parents, not the state.

If kids are online, that is a CHOICE made by PARENTS. Families are best placed to decide what is appropriate for their children, based on maturity, circumstance and individual needs. A blanket ban replaces parental judgement with state control.

2) Such a “ban” would almost certainly require compulsory digital ID.

Enforcing age verification at scale almost certainly means forcing every citizen to prove their identity to access basic online services. The British public has just rejected compulsory digital ID proposals, yet this would introduce it through the back door.

Mission creep to cover the entire internet – not only social media – seems inevitable.

Anonymity protects whistleblowers, vulnerable people and political dissenters alike, and this would destroy that too.

3) Online activity is beneficial for many children, and there are unintended consequences from banning it.

For millions of young people online platforms provide vital spaces for information, connection, self-identity, enjoyment, peer support and access to trusted advice and help. Removing these spaces risks isolating the very children who most need them.

Already, 42 children’s and online safety organisations, experts and bereaved families – including the NSPCC – have issued a joint statement saying even they do NOT support this proposal.

They point out that banning children from social media risks an array of unintended consequences – creating a false sense of safety while simply pushing children into darker, unregulated corners of the internet where they are harder to protect.

Meanwhile, the Government wants to give 16 year-olds the vote, yet teaches children that free expression online does not apply to them. That contradiction undermines democracy.

4) It would be unworkable.

Teenagers will inevitably find workarounds through VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), foreign platforms and fake credentials – pushing them further beyond parental oversight.

5) Such a system would hand the state powerful new tools to monitor and control online speech.

Once identity verification is embedded into everyday communication, it becomes trivially easy to suppress dissent, journalism, and democratic scrutiny. This is not a power any government should be given.

In addition:

Big social media platforms already know an extraordinary amount about their users and already use AI to infer whether someone is a child or teenager. Before requiring millions of adults to prove their age with government-issued ID, the burden should be on both the Government and the platforms to demonstrate why the enormous quantities of behavioural data already collected cannot provide an effective, less intrusive alternative – and why imposing an ID checkpoint on everyone is genuinely necessary and proportionate.

Let’s not allow what is an emotive issue for some to push us straight into another Digital ID trap.