A teen social media ban is an admission of total and utter failure to govern online spaces

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A teen social media ban is an admission of total and utter failure to govern online spaces<br>The UK government is currently calling for steps that fall short of a teen social media ban. Here's why it shouldn't take the next step.

James Ball<br>Jun 08, 2026

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"Granary Square, Kings Cross" by Alan Stanton is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.<br>This is an article about online spaces, but let’s start it by thinking about offline ones. I live near Finsbury Park, in north London, a city blessed with many such public spaces. It’s a huge public space with a whole host of uses. It has playgrounds for younger children, a lake where people feed ducks and ride pedal boats, and tennis courts used by all ages. Occasionally, it is privately booked for music festivals and gigs.<br>Ten minutes down the road, near King’s Cross, is Granary Square, the result of a regeneration project in the area. Outside the new Central St Martins campus is a large square full of fountains, through which young children run on hot days. There is space to picnic, open-air markets, and the space hosts public screenings of events like Wimbledon.<br>Finsbury Park is publicly owned and open to the public. Granary Square is a bit different: it is open to the public, but the entire development is privately owned. To almost everyone, it looks and feels like public space, but it operates by different rules. The development corporation that owns the land can set additional rules, and exclude whoever it wishes.<br>True public spaces are owned by the public and maintained solely for our enjoyment and benefit. Quasi-public spaces look and feel the same, but they’re run with a different motive in mind – they’re made nice for us so as to generate profit for their owners. It’s a means to an end, rather than the point of the exercise. Most of the time, the difference between the two is invisible, but that doesn’t make it any the less important.<br>Private spaces, public consequences<br>What does any of it have to do with the internet, though? Well, let’s think through what happens when things go wrong with our real-world public spaces. Let us imagine Finsbury Park or Granary Square full of discarded rubbish, perhaps even including chemicals or broken glass. Picture it no longer policed, so that muggers or worse patrol it without fear of consequences. Imagine either full of drug addicts, leaving discarded hypodermic needles scattered around.<br>It is fair to say that few of us would want to let our children play in such neglected and dangerous public spaces. Whether they were still open or not, parents would surely stop taking their young children there, and they would warn their older teenagers against going there at once. Parents would not need to wait for their governments to order them to do so.<br>But similarly, no citizen would let a public space in that state of disrepair continue to operate. It doesn’t matter that Granary Square is privately owned – that doesn’t mean the laws of the land don’t apply there. It can set additional rules of its own, but every law that applies to a public park is in force there, too.<br>This is not a concept we find difficult or confusing in the offline world. But for some reason, we find the same ideas much more challenging in the online space. There are almost no truly public spaces on the internet. Everywhere we congregate is privately owned, even if it operates as a public space. But we seem somehow content to accept them as fiefdoms in their own right, beyond the reach of government. Instead of demanding that they function as safe and pleasant public spaces for all of us, we are asking our governments just to ban teenagers from them.<br>The UK government has lots of powers to govern the internet that it simply isn’t using. Hosting images of child abuse is a strict liability offence, one that Elon Musk’s X platform blatantly breached with its Grok chatbot. The government gave itself extensive powers to regulate social platforms under the Online Safety Act, which it has never even made an attempt to enforce.<br>Doing so might be politically difficult – the US government has made it clear it regards attempts to govern online spaces as “censorship”, or an intrusion against US interests – but governments are there for the hard jobs, and there was never an agreement to give the US sovereignty over the internet. We are still inside UK borders when we use the internet. The infrastructure is here. The revenue is made here. The internet is eminently governable.

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Teenage trespassers<br>It is one thing to ban our children from one park when there are others nearby. It is quite another to ban them from every public space when there are no others on offer. In the 21st century, life is lived online – adults of all ages socialise through the internet, we get our information from it, we learn from it, and we rely on it for vital...