Two years ago, when Daisy Greenwell and a group of fellow British parents first gathered to share concerns about the risks their children faced online, the government made it clear, she said, that it had no interest in passing new laws on the issue.
“It always felt like a long way off,” said Ms. Greenwell, a founder of Smartphone Free Childhood, a British charity. “But then the political winds changed.”
Now, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government is weighing whether to introduce a ban on social media platforms for children under 16, as public opinion in Britain has coalesced around the idea that more needs to be done to keep children safe online.
Mr. Starmer said last week that the question was not whether his government would act but what it would do, and that a decision would come “very quickly.” Here is how Britain got here.
Some protections exist, but advocates say they don’t go far enough.
When the current Labour government was voted into office in 2024, it said it had no plan to restrict social media for children or to ban phones in schools.
The previous government, led by the Conservative Party, had already passed a broad law in 2023, the Online Safety Act, to regulate harmful content. The country’s media and internet regulator, known as Ofcom, enforces those regulations and can fine or prosecute tech companies that do not comply.
Critics argue that the law has proved unable to ensure child safety.
Sonia Livingstone, a professor at the London School of Economics who studies children’s digital rights, said that while Britain had worked to build thoughtful online-safety legislation over many years, enforcement was a big issue.
She said the Online Safety Act was “significant, likely to change the internet and children’s experience for the better, but also enormously slow and cumbersome.”
“So it’s been a really long process,” she said, “and too long for the public to bear with.”
This year, Ofcom, the British regulator, asked platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to do more to protect children. It reported in May that companies were still not enforcing minimum-age rules.
Senior police officials have warned that the design of social media, messaging apps and gaming platforms allows pedophiles to target children at a mass scale and that young people have been coerced into sharing nude images and videos and then blackmailed.
Algorithms have also pushed content to children that glorifies self-harm and extreme violence, the police said. In some cases, children have been radicalized or coerced into violence.
Public pressure has grown for government action.
As support for age limits on social media has grown in recent months, pressure has risen on the government to act. One YouGov poll found that 74 percent of Britons supported a ban on social media for children under 16.
Mr. Starmer met with the creators of the TV series “Adolescence” last March after it became Britain’s most watched show, in which a schoolboy is accused of murder after being exposed to online misogyny. After the meeting, the government said it was “committed to listening and will not hesitate to strengthen the law further where necessary.”
In December, Australia banned social media for those under 16. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative Party, promised to follow that example if her party were elected to government.
Mr. Starmer’s government signaled an openness to shifting its position in March this year, when it invited the public’s input on online safety for children. The government has said that it will publish an analysis of the responses in summer 2026.
Speaking at a London tech conference on Monday, Mr. Starmer announced that if tech companies operating in Britain did not introduce controls to prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images, the law would be changed. The government said companies had three months to act or face fines, and it said it was considering criminal liability for leaders who failed to comply.
The U.S. Embassy in Britain said it had weighed in on the issue during the invitation for public input and said it did not support a ban, noting that it disagreed with “imposing one-size-fits-all content restrictions or mandating specific design choices” and was against “blunt regulatory instruments.”
Many parents and top police officials believe in a social media ban for children.
Smartphone Free Childhood saw interest from parents explode in the past year, Ms. Greenwell said. Many believe that the Australian ban offered a model, she said. “That suddenly meant that we could actually do something about this,” she said, “and that these tech companies aren’t too big to regulate.”
Not all parents agree with a ban. Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly was 14 when she took her own life in 2017 after viewing content relating to suicide and self-harm, has long campaigned for online safety. But, referring to an Online Safety Act rule that tech companies must keep inappropriate content from children, he said a ban would “let social media platforms off the hook by weakening the requirement for them to offer safe and high-quality experiences as a precondition for operating in the U.K.”
“Bans are the wrong answer to a vital question,” he said in a statement, adding that Mr. Starmer should instead strengthen existing regulations.
The National Crime Agency, which is responsible for combating serious crime in Britain, and the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which coordinates policing nationally, last month recommended that online platforms that could not guarantee child safety be banned for those under 16.
“In every other walk of everyday life, there are laws and safeguards in place to protect children,” said Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council. “And yet the online space remains something of a Wild West where legislation and regulation has failed to keep up with the pace of technology.”
Some experts in online safety warn a ban could be ineffective.
Victoria Nash, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, said that
there could be huge benefits for some young people in using safe social media spaces where they can connect with peers or support groups.
But she said she believed that a ban was unlikely to be effective. She pointed to the results of one online survey of 1,050 young people in Australia suggesting that more than 60 percent of those under 16 were still using their social media accounts.
She said that enforcing existing laws and holding tech companies responsible for safety would be more effective. A ban, she said, “seems like a very blunt tool that offers quite significant opportunity cost.”
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