Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to announce a ban on children under 16 using major social media platforms in Britain, the centerpiece of a wider package of online-safety measures aimed at protecting teenagers. The government plans to raise the minimum age to 16 for services including TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat and Reddit, following the model Australia adopted for under-16s.
Starmer is expected to unveil the plans at a Downing Street press conference on Monday morning before departing for the G7 summit in France. Alongside the age limit, officials have signaled additional restrictions, including curfews on social-media use for older teenagers and tougher rules governing AI chatbots aimed at or accessible to children.
The government says the public is firmly behind the move. More than 90 percent of parents backed raising the minimum age in a government consultation, a level of support ministers have cited as a mandate for one of the most far-reaching online-safety interventions attempted by a major Western democracy.
The announcement marks a notable shift for Starmer, who had previously been cool to an outright ban, favoring tighter regulation of platforms over age cutoffs. The change of course aligns Britain with Australia, whose under-16 restrictions have been watched closely by governments weighing how to respond to mounting concern about social media's effects on young people.
Enforcement will be the central question. Age-verification requirements have proved technically fraught and legally contested elsewhere, and platforms have warned about the privacy implications of checking users' ages at scale. Ministers will have to spell out how the ban would be policed and what penalties companies would face for failing to keep younger users off their services.
The policy lands at a politically delicate moment. Starmer travels to the G7 days after the resignation of his defense secretary, John Healey, in a dispute over military spending — a departure followed by the armed forces minister — that has fueled questions about the prime minister's grip on his party and his agenda.
Child-safety campaigners have pushed for years for stronger curbs on minors' access to social platforms, citing links between heavy use and harms to mental health, sleep and exposure to harmful content. Technology companies and some free-speech and digital-rights groups have cautioned that blunt age bans can be circumvented and may cut young people off from beneficial online communities.
Starmer's challenge will be to turn a popular announcement into workable law. The detail he sets out on Monday — on verification, timing and enforcement — will determine whether the under-16 ban becomes a durable policy or runs into the practical obstacles that have tripped up similar efforts abroad.