Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will meet on Thursday with officials from several American social media companies as his government considers introducing new rules to protect children online, his office said Wednesday.
The meeting at No. 10 Downing Street will include officials from Meta, Snap, Google, TikTok and X, the prime minister’s office said in a statement. Mr. Starmer intends to tell the company executives that Britain is poised to act “within months, not years” and to ask how they are addressing parents’ concerns.
“Social media shapes how children see themselves, their friendships and the world around them,” Mr. Starmer said in the statement. “When that comes with real risks, looking the other way is not an option.”
The prime minister’s increasingly aggressive posture on the issue is in line with many parents in Britain, who have repeatedly told pollsters that they want the government to do more to protect children from harms related to social media and cellphone use. Mounting evidence of the risks to developing brains posed by addictive technology, extreme video content pushed by social media algorithms and rising rates of anxiety and self-harm among teenagers have piled pressure on the government to act.
Last year, more than 124,000 parents of children across the country signed a pact pledging not to allow their children to get phones before the end of Year 9, which is equivalent to the eighth grade in the United States.
Some members of the prime minister’s Labour Party have urged him to follow the lead of the government in Australia, which has banned the use of social media for children under 16.
But Mr. Starmer’s vow to act has already drawn the ire of President Trump and other conservatives in America, who claim that Britain is treading on the free speech rights of its own citizens and unfairly restricting big tech companies that are based in the United States but operating around the world.
At a meeting with tech CEOs at the White House last September, Mr. Trump called the British efforts to crack down on free speech “sad.” And one of the State Department’s top diplomats has repeatedly chided British officials over internet regulation, including a law passed by Britain’s previous Conservative government that introduced age-verification requirements for pornography sites and other rules to reduce hate speech and illicit material.
“What the Online Safety Act did,” Sarah Rogers, the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, said in a speech to a British group late last year, “is it purported to codify, for purposes of extraterritorial enforcement, the requirement that companies on other countries’ soil, including notably American soil, adhere to British hate speech, public order and other censorious doctrines.” She added: “That, my friends, is a deal breaker.”
Mr. Starmer has spent much of the last year-and-a-half trying to avoid antagonizing Mr. Trump because of Britain’s deep economic, cultural and security ties to the United States.
But with local and regional elections set to take place in Britain on May 7, the prime minister appears eager to show his government will act on an issue that could prove popular with voters, even if it means angering the president.
In an article Mr. Starmer published on Substack in February, the prime minister said that actions under consideration include setting a minimum age limit for social media apps, restricting autoplay of videos for children by default, and limiting the use of VPN services to make it harder for children to evade age limits.
The Online Safety Act already requires porn sites to impose age verifications to prevent children from viewing their content. Recently, Apple issued new software that requires iPhone users in Britain to prove their age to download apps.
British officials are in the middle of a three-month review of existing laws that includes a public consultation, in which parents, experts and other groups around the country share their views and concerns. That review ends on May 26 and the government has said it plans to move quickly once it has concluded.
“I will take whatever steps necessary to keep children safe online,” Mr. Starmer said in the statement, adding that the meeting on Thursday would be “about making sure social media companies step up and take responsibility.”
Michael D. Shear is the chief U.K. correspondent for The New York Times, covering British politics and culture and diplomacy around the world.
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