The Government has announced that it will consult on the use of social media by young people, including whether a ban should be introduced for children below a certain age.

The consultation follows increasing cross-party pressure from parliamentarians that stronger action is needed to address the effects of social media use on young people. At the beginning of last week, a group of MPs wrote to the Prime Minister urging him to impose a ban for those under 16 years old along the lines of that introduced recently in Australia, arguing that “successive Governments have done far too little to protect young people from the consequences of unregulated, addictive social media platforms”.

At the same time, the House of Lords voted last week in favour of an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill which would introduce measures requiring “all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users”, as well as prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the UK.

The Government has said that it intends to overturn the amendment in the House of Commons, arguing instead that “this is an extremely complex issue” which demands the gathering of “necessary evidence and insight before changing the law”.

With that in mind, the Government will launch a consultation exploring a range of possible measures to “protect young people’s wellbeing and ensure safer online experiences”, including:

• Raising the digital age of consent;
• Exploring a minimum age for children to access social media;
• Implementing ‘phone curfews’ to avoid excessive use;
• Removing or limiting potentially addictive design features such as so-called ‘infinite scrolling’; and
• Exploring ways to improve the accuracy of age assurance.

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