Alternatives to the UK government’s social media ban | MattCASmith

MattCASmith

Alternatives to the UK government’s social media ban

2026-06-21

Cyber Security,

Technology

Last week I covered the UK government’s plans to effectively force phone manufacturers to implement on-device age checks and content scanning. I wrote about the security risks of ID checks and the horrible implications for privacy, when in order to identify who is and isn’t a child the nation’s adults will be forced to link their real-life identities to their online activities.

The UK government is quietly eroding online anonymity →

Last week's post covering the government's content scanning plans and the related privacy issues

In the days that followed, the government announced further plans – this time for a social media ban for children. Sites like TikTok, Facebook, X, and Instagram will be blocked completely for under-16s, while 17 and 18 year-olds will be subject to government-enforced “overnight curfews”.

The ends are a net good – in my eyes, social media in its modern form is undoubtedly harmful, and I don’t buy the argument that kids’ lives will be missing anything without access – but as before, the means are the concern. This doesn’t only affect children. It affects every adult in the UK and their freedom to use their devices and access the internet without snooping.

Parentally-enforced curfews are much more reasonable than mass ID checks

For that reason, I was disappointed to see the response to critics of the ban was often a dismissive: “Oh, so you think social media is good for children?” Deliberate or not, that’s a complete misreading of people’s concerns.

But rather than spending another week running through everything that worries me about the government’s plans, I’m going to adopt the optimistic tone I’m aiming for and suggest some alternatives that could be just as – and in some cases more – effective than blanket mandatory ID checks.

Parental oversight

The most obvious countermeasure to kids accessing things they shouldn’t online is to remove their ability to browse without supervision. When I was young, internet access was confined to a family computer, used in one of the communal rooms in the house where my parents could see what I was doing. I was given my first phone that could send text messages at 14, and mobile internet access – including social media – came much later on.

But that was a different time. When I got that first phone, social media barely existed, mobile web access was slow and basic, and smartphones hadn’t been invented yet. There are “dumb phones” on the market now that emulate the Nokia 3310 experience, but parents might be hesitant to buy them, instead prioritising future-proofing, or giving kids hand-me-down smartphones.

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What smartphones do offer are parental controls. In the Apple ecosystem, for example, children’s iPhones can be set up under their parents’ accounts, and some quite granular restrictions can be applied using Screen Time. Parents can limit access to certain apps completely, set time limits on others, and effectively implement their own curfews with the Downtime feature.

The counterargument is that this requires parents who both care about their kids’ smartphone usage and are technically literate enough to configure their own restrictions. There are some low-tech alternatives – like not allowing phones in the bedroom to prevent overnight usage when children should be sleeping – but not all kids will be protected without a centralised approach.

Outlawing manipulative design

When some number of children will always get online, you must go to the source: the social media companies. The big tech firms have already added some features to protect kids, likely to try to ward off regulation, but tools like Instagram’s teen accounts still require parental involvement to set up.

The problem is that social media isn’t what it used to be. In the late 2000s, sites like Facebook were simple chronological feeds of your friends’ posts – you checked their updates, hit the end of the list, and stopped. But now they serve algorithmically-generated feeds, drawing in content from outside your network in a way designed to manipulate emotions and drive engagement.

Tighter regulation of those algorithms – as well as supporting features like infinite scroll – would have the dual benefit of dulling the addictive element of social media (by adding a natural break-off point to sessions once the user is caught up) and reducing exposure to potentially harmful content (because more of what the user sees would be from people they choose to follow).

The other notable difference is that this would benefit the entire population. While children are worst affected, many adults are also...