Introduction  

On 15th June 2026, the UK Government announced proposals for a ‘social media ban’ for those under the age of sixteen (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, 2026a). The proposed ban, expected to begin in early 2027, centres on ‘user-to-user’ social media platforms such as Facebook, X, TikTok and Instagram (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, 2026a). Shortly after the announcement, an (ironically) viral social media clip emerged from a BBC live television report. When asked what they would do with their time without social media, having spent nine hours using it the previous weekend, a young person’s deadpan response was ‘stare at a wall’ (BBC, 2026). We think that this humorous clip captures some of the inherent issues with ‘banning’ young people from accessing social media; particularly the lack of meaningful engagement with young people globally about these bans, and a more general disregard of young people’s time, opinions, and lived expertise.

Although young people were invited to participate in a consultation before the proposed ban was announced (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, 2026b), this took the form of a structured survey with limited opportunities for presenting alternative viewpoints or proposals. The proper inclusion of young people’s voices in this debate internationally requires deeper and more meaningful consultations. As Selwyn and Southerton (2026) suggest at the end of their recent blogpost:

perhaps most important is the need to properly listen to – and work with – the young people themselves who are the subjects of these bans, but who have been largely sidelined in the rush to legislate.”

That the proposed legislation, which has been drafted by adult policy makers without meaningfully engaging young people, is a critical concern. In this article, we take these arguments further by considering what meaningful engagement with young people should look like, and suggest ways in which it could be done, offering a timely and relevant contribution to current policy debates.

In this article we first outline the debates behind the proposed ban in the UK, and its antecedents in Australia’s ban in 2025 (Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024), identifying the absence of young people’s voices in both contexts. We then examine how these policies, like others, frame young people as largely passive, already at risk/risky and in-deficit (Turnbull & Spence, 2011). We conclude by setting out how youth studies scholarship can help meaningfully engage with young people in the development of social media policy.

Why social media bans?

Following the Australian ban from December 2025, many similar proposals/bans have emerged elsewhere in the world, including Canada (Parliament of Canada, 2026), New Zealand (Social Media Bill, 2025), Indonesia (Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, 2026) and France (Reuters, 2026). In the UK, the proposed ban is the latest in a long series of policy proposals aimed at youth safety in digital environments. Only three years ago, the UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) was introduced as an attempt to place greater responsibility on social media companies for the content they promote, using the threat of significant fines if they failed to self-regulate (Schmidt, 2024). Calls for a social media ban in the UK have grown in recent months, and have particularly been promoted by parent-led groups, such as Mumsnet (Evans, 2026).

Some of the reasons given for bans relate to concerns about bullying, exposure to harmful content, and mental health, amongst others. Indeed, the phrase ‘social media harms’ has now been extended to cover a wide range of sociological and psychological issues, from loneliness to grooming and abuse, that do not necessarily share the same causes or solutions (Setty, 2026). Mental health has become a particular focus of concerns around youth and social media. In Haidt’s polemical book The Anxious Generation (2024), the growth of youth mental health issues are directly attributed to the parallel rise in social media use. This argument has become particularly potent in debates about youth social media bans^[1], despite empirical research finding limited associations between social media and poorer mental health for young people (Orben and Przybylski, 2019). Banning young people’s access to smartphones and social media is seen as a ‘silver bullet’ to resolving youth mental health issues, but has been pursued at the expense of the wider picture of young people’s experiences of school pressures and exam and study stress (Brown & Carr, 2019), lack of spaces to socialise and loneliness (Batsleer and Duggan, 2020), dismantling of youth services during decades of austerity (Mason, 2015) amongst other crises and stresses. That is there has been little consideration for how intersecting crises and enduring social inequalities (Moore et al, 2021) create and exacerbate uncertainty and precarity for young people.

Instead of reducing harms there is the real possibility bans might actually have negative impacts on young people. For instance, it may contribute to mental health issues by compounding social isolation (see Rasidi, 2026) and reducing access to online support networks, with substantial impacts on young people’s wellbeing. This is particularly true for young people who might not have access to resources in the first place which is worsened by bans, such as queer young people (see Hanckel et al, 2019; Hanckel and Chandra, 2021), young people with disabilities (Alper and Goggin, 2017); and also young victims/survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) and (parental) violence in the home (Storer et al, 2022). Further, there are ongoing implications of blanket bans for young people’s futures, such as limiting their access to news (Dezuanni et al, 2026; Taylor, 2026) and citizenship education through exposure to political debates on social media (Ghazarian, 2025) .

In the UK there has been no precedent for a total ban of an entire form of media for young people. Concerns about comics, radio, television, and video games over the last hundred years have instead involved more nuanced approaches to regulating ‘child’ vs. ‘adult’ content and scaffolding young people’s access over time (Buckingham & Jensen, 2012). The current proposed bans instead have more in common with medical and criminal justice approaches, treating social media as ‘dangerous’ and ‘addictive’, akin to how alcohol and drugs are understood to be, both policy fields in which age-based and total legislative bans have long and troubled histories (Room 1994, Koram 2019). In light of a lack of emerging evidence regarding the ‘success’ of the social media ban in Australia (see Molly Rose Foundation, 2026), scholars have offered alternatives to a blanket ban such as a harm reduction or minimization (Champion et al, 2025; Doyle et al, 2026). With young people understood to be more tech-savvy than adults and more effective at bypassing controls (Howick, 2026), critics argue that the total bans won’t work, and may do more harm than good (Ringrose & Coleman, 2025). The ‘ban’ policy frames young people as the problem, or as a ‘lifestage’ (childhood) to be protected; for example in UK legislation – ‘let children be children’. The framing of young people as ‘the problem’ invisibilises tech platforms and their roles and responsibilities, as well as broader cultures that enable violence (see Morales et al, 2026).

Where are young people in these debates?

Extensive academic studies provide a rich and nuanced picture of young people’s social media use, recognising for instance its positive impact on young people’s identities and relationships (e.g. Wang and Edwards, 2016). Social media engagement can be especially important for marginalised groups, such as LGBTQ+ young people who may find some online spaces to be a refuge from the transphobia and cisnormativity they are subjected to in offline spaces (Austin et al 2020; Eisenberg et al, 2025). It is equally important to recognise that, although young people do encounter risk online, research suggests that they have the ability to consciously make informed decisions to negotiate this (see Hanckel et al, 2019). Framing young social media users as mere passive recipients of social media bans obscures the risk negotiation skills young people continuously practise in their online/offline worlds, skills whose very acknowledgement would undermine prohibitive ‘ban’ logic.

A less nuanced picture was presented by the consultation from the UK government’s Department for Technology, Science and Innovation (2026a). By launching a consultation to ‘ensure children can engage with the online world safely’, it assumed that they are not already engaging with social media safely, or have the tools to navigate this themselves, despite evidence that this is not always the case (see above). Instead, it views young people’s use of social media through an ‘at risk’ lens (Hanckel and Hendry, 2026). It is perhaps unsurprising then, that the consultation found ‘9 in 10 parents [are] backing a social media ban’. Further, evidence from the consultation stated that two thirds of young people felt that ‘under-16s should not be allowed to use at least some social media platforms’ – this does not directly support a blanket ban of all user-to-user platforms proposed in the new UK legislation.

Youth Centred Approaches

Critiquing the deficit positioning and perpetrator / victim portrayals of young people in social policy (Threadgold, 2020), the proposed social media bans are the latest legislative response to a succession of ‘moral panics’ built upon worst-case scenarios (Sutcliffe, 2025). As well as risks around increased surveillance, with age verification needing biometric verification (Ward 2026), and the isolation of young people from online forms of support and education (Nagata et al, 2025), there has been little to no meaningful consultation with the population most impacted by the ban: young people themselves. This is concerning given young people have a right to be involved in decisions affecting their lives through conventions such as the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child locating rights across three dimensions: provision, protection and participation.

Returning to Selwyn and Southerton (2026), we agree that we have to ‘properly listen to – and work with’ young people who are going to be impacted by the proposed ban. Such calls for greater youth involvement in shaping support for young people in a digital world are not new. There has long been a concern that ‘internet safety’ (particularly through schools) has been designed from an adult-centric view of ‘risk’, often to the exclusion of young people’s voices and concerns (Hope, 2015), and the everyday realities of their engagement with our digital world (Thomson et al. 2018). We move these arguments forward by suggesting how policy makers can listen to and work with young people when it comes to social media policies.

In our recent book: Researching with Young People: An Introduction to Youth-Centred Research Methods (Howard et al. 2025), we identify a ”continuum of participation’ whereby ‘thick participation’ means full participation of young people, as equal collaborators” (see Figure 1, p.87 Howard et al.). We argue that engagement with young people over the proposed social media bans has equated to ‘thin participation’ where only selected aspects of the debate have involved young people (if at all).

There are however other possibilities for including young people that could offer thicker and richer forms of participation and policy development, these include:

• Actively and creatively involving young people in the ‘safe’ design of new smartphones and social media platforms that benefit them and suit their needs
• Working with young people to scrutinise the affordances of platforms, and identifying specific design choices that amplify and/or exacerbate existing mental health issues amongst young people (e.g. Orben et al. 2024)
• Co-producing research to further investigate risks in context when (and if) they arise from young people’s experience and digital practices (Hanckel and Hendry, 2026)
• Creating (non-judgemental) mechanisms of feedback so that young people can raise concerns about inadvertent negative impacts of the ban, without risking penalty, or stigma.

Figure 1: Continuum of Participation (p.87 Howard et al.)

Youth studies, we argue, has these tools and methods to assist policy makers. These offer resources to allow us to rethink how young people are positioned in responding to policies that impact them.

Policy Implications

Within the new UK youth strategy – Youth Matters – there is a chapter titled: Seen and Heard. This calls for involving young people in decisions that affect them as a matter of fairness, but also improved decision-making and better solutions. This includes delivering with young people by putting them ‘in the driving seat of their own lives’ (action 9) and ‘holding us to account’ (action 10) (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2025). We question why this policy imperative is not being put into practice through the social media ban.

A key policy implication is the precedent of social media bans and their potential global impact. Will Australia, the UK, Indonesia and France cause a domino effect whereby other nations extend social media restrictions upon young people? How will this in turn impact our post-covid globalised societies which depend upon telecommunications and digital sovereignty? And what impact will restricted online activities have for MENA and Global South countries? It would seem that social media bans produce more questions than answers.

There is an opportunity here for leading policy making processes that work with young people. Given that bans directly impact young people’s lives, this is a time for innovation and a policy making approach oriented by the UK youth strategy (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2025). Centring youth centred tools and approaches and taking learnings from youth studies (e.g. Howard et al, 2025) are productive ways forward for meaningfully engaging with young people in future policy making.

Conclusion

Youth-centred approaches that meaningfully bring young people into conversations about policies that impact them are critical. Growing calls from researchers and advocates are asking where young people are in the social media policy debate, with an emphasis on the need to include their ‘voices’. We have identified a need to work with young people. This means not just including young people’s ‘voices’ or inputs on pre-set consultative measures, which can be tokenistic. Those making decisions impacting on young people need timely tools to actively listen and meaningfully engage with them.

Youth studies scholarship can advance debates on UK policy – showing the strength and relevance of the field to current and emerging policies that affect young people, including by centring their voices. This is an opportunity to offer world-leading youth-centred policy.

Our argument goes beyond the current proposed social media ban and offers a case study of policy making about young people in contrast to with them. We need policy making that can meaningfully work with young people and intentionally learn from young people into the future. The question is not how do we regulate young people’s activities; the question should be: how do we work with young people to develop policy that builds their capabilities and capacities for the future.