Every Reason Not To Ban It

The Argument Against The Ban.

The ban's real. I wrote about that on Monday. With an issue such as this, there was always going to be a range of opinions, so here is every argument I've heard this week. I'll take them one by one, what I think back, and where I'm on shakier ground than I'd like to admit.

Before any of that. This isn't the kids' fault. None of it. Not the boys, not the girls. The fault sits in two places and neither of them is a child's bedroom. It sits with the tech companies who built algorithms to maximise engagement and profit, knowing exactly what that does to a developing brain, and let it happen anyway because the money was too good to stop. And it sits with the men who use these platforms to groom, target and abuse children, the actual perpetrators, doing actual harm, with consequences that last a lifetime. A child radicalised by an algorithm and a child groomed by a predator have both been failed by adults who knew better. We must never confuse the harm with the person carrying it.

1. "It's the parents' job, not the government's"

A lot of people have said this. And I'd love that to be true. It isn't. Because of money. Because of time. Because of the cost of living crisis grinding parents into two jobs or a single income stretched thin, and because even the best parent in the world is fighting a billion pound company with engineers and behavioural scientists on the payroll whose entire job is keeping a kid scrolling. There's no single phone setting that does this. Every app has its own parental controls, buried differently, broken differently, quietly changed every time the app updates.

It only takes 23 minutes for the algorithm to start pushing toxic, anti-feminist content to teenage boy accounts, whether they go looking for it or not, and on some platforms it can happen in under ten[^1]. And separate research has found that just seven to eight minutes of pro-anorexia content on TikTok is enough to measurably worsen body image and increase internalised beauty standards in young women[^2]. No parent on earth is watching closely enough to catch that every single time. This isn't a parenting failure. It's a fight nobody set up fairly.

2. "This is just the government harvesting our data"

I don't have a clean answer to this one. I'm not handing any government a blank cheque just because the headline sounds protective. What I'd say is this. We already hand over ID for cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, knives. Nobody's arguing we scrap those checks because the system isn't perfect. And we're already giving away a stupid amount of data every single day, to every app, every service, every bit of small print nobody reads. Anyone who's freaked out after their phone served them an advert for the exact thing they were just talking about knows that. Data breaches happen anyway, in the normal world, all the time. None of that is a reason to leave children unprotected. It's a reason to watch closely how this gets built, and I am.

3. "It didn't work in Australia, so it won't work here"

Australia isn't Britain. Different country, different law, different enforcement, barely any time to prove anything either way. Australia's own eSafety Commissioner reported that platforms removed or restricted around 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to under-16s in the first weeks the law took effect[^3]. The Commissioner herself made a point worth repeating: she compared it to speed limits, noting that success is measured by reduction in harm and resetting cultural norms, not by nobody ever breaking the rule.

A later three-month review from the same regulator found close to half of parents surveyed said their children still had a YouTube account, and the report stated plainly that many children under 16 still have accounts or can create new ones[^4]. People are using that to call the whole thing a failure.

But that number only measures one generation, the kids who'd already built the habit, already had the accounts, already knew exactly what they were missing and exactly how to get it back. Of course a chunk of them found a workaround. The test that matters is the generation who never start. Same as smoking. When the legal age went up, every smoker already hooked was furious, and plenty kept smoking anyway, found a way, got an older mate to buy the packet. Didn't matter in the end. There's no culture of teenage smoking now like there was for my generation, because the kids who never started never had the habit to break. That takes years to show up, not months. Judging this ban on Australia's first cohort of escapees is judging it before the real result exists.

The comparison only goes so far though. Cigarettes had nothing real going for them, just the idea that they looked cool, with none of the actual benefit. Social media gives isolated kids community, gives anyone information, gives teenagers a place to work out who they are. The cost of losing it is real in a way the cost of losing cigarettes never was. The mechanism, a generation never forming the habit, still holds. The price being paid by that generation in the meantime is higher than it was for smoking, and I don't think it's right to pretend otherwise.

4. "These apps already have child safety settings"

This is the argument that gets used to say regulation isn't needed. It's actually the proof that it is. Where it differs from the parents' point above is this: it's not that parents aren't trying, it's that the platforms themselves are offering a fix they have no real incentive to make work. Those settings are opt-in. They get bypassed constantly. They quietly get rolled back the moment they cost the platform engagement, because the platform's entire business model depends on the opposite of safety. Amnesty International has made exactly this point: too many social media companies have built products that prioritise keeping children engaged for longer, at the expense of their wellbeing[^5]. Self-regulation has had years to work. It hasn't.

5. "This punishes children, not the platforms"

This is the one I take most seriously. Amnesty International's position is that banning under-16s risks treating children as the problem rather than addressing the companies and systems that create the risk in the first place, and that the fix should be the manipulative design itself, the autoplay, the infinite scroll, the algorithm built to never let go[^5]. I agree with the diagnosis completely. Where I'd push back is on timing, not on which fix matters more. Regulating algorithmic design properly means years of legislation, enforcement infrastructure, and a fight with companies who'll spend a fortune resisting every inch of it. An age restriction is something government can actually do now, this year, while that much longer fight is still being fought. That's not "we can do both" as a comfortable shrug. It's that only one of the two fixes is available immediately, and a child turning thirteen this September doesn't have years to wait for the other one to arrive.

The ban only delays exposure too. The same algorithm is waiting on the other side of sixteen, built exactly the same way, and a kid who turns sixteen with no more media literacy than they had the day before walks straight into it. The ban buys time. It doesn't buy immunity. That's exactly why the platform fight still has to happen alongside it, not instead of it.

6. "It'll isolate vulnerable kids, cut them off from their peer groups"

This one carries real weight too, and I don't think the obvious answer fully meets it. Yes, messaging apps aren't in scope, so nobody loses their actual mates. But that's not really what's being asked. The worry is about the kid who hasn't found their people yet, the LGBTQIA teenager in a small town, the disabled kid who can't get to a youth group, the ones for whom an online community wasn't a nice extra but the only place they were understood. Saying you can still text your friends doesn't answer that, because the worry was never about friends they already have. That's a real cost, paid by real children, while better local provision gets built over years it'll take to fund and deliver. I think the ban is still worth it. I don't think that cost should be waved away to make the argument feel cleaner than it is. Alongside this there needs to be serious investment, properly funded youth clubs, after school activities, real places to exist together that aren't a screen, because right now the phone is filling a gap that should never have been a phone's job to fill.

7. "Kids will get round it anyway, VPNs, fake IDs"

Another popular comment. And true. And not a reason to do nothing. Kids have always found older mates to buy them cigarettes and booze. We didn't scrap the laws because of that. We accept some people will dodge a rule and still think the rule is worth having, in literally every other area of life involving children and harm. This is no different.

"You're addicted, that's why you're upset"

One smaller thought worth sitting with before I close this out. The most recent UK Youth Poll found 70% of 25 to 29 year olds support the ban, but that falls to just over half among 16 and 17 year olds[^6]. The temptation is to say their anger doesn't count because they're the ones losing the thing. But that logic cuts both ways. I'm a parent who's spent months building art about exactly this harm. My certainty isn't neutral either.

For a teenager right now, this isn't a minor inconvenience. This is everything they've known taken out from under them with barely any warning. Their group chats, their inside jokes, the place where their friendships actually happen, the identity they've built, all of it, gone or about to go. We don't get to wave that away with a brisk well done, that's that then. It's a genuinely massive thing to lose, and pretending otherwise so the argument feels cleaner is dishonest. I still think the ban is right. I don't think that means the loss isn't real.

So where does that leave us? More than 90% of the 116,211 consultation responses backed the ban[^7]. 77% of UK parents with children under 18 support it, and so do 76% of Britons overall, though only 45% think it'll actually be effective[^8]. 62% of young people in the most recent youth poll back it too, down slightly from 67% the year before, with around a third opposed[^6]. And that same youth poll didn't include 13 to 15 year olds, despite Ofcom reporting that 95% of that age group are online, the exact age group this law actually targets. I'm not saying take a fourteen year old's vote on losing Instagram and treat it as the final word, nobody's view should be decided purely by what they're currently attached to, adult or child. I'm saying nobody's properly tracked what this actually looks like from inside the age bracket it's aimed at, and that gap should bother everyone on every side of this, not just the people arguing against the ban.

None of this is black and white. Most of the arguments against it aren't unreasonable, and several of them land somewhere real that I'm not going to pretend away. But somewhere underneath every single one of them is the same root cause. Boys radicalised into misogyny before they're old enough to vote. Girls taught to hate their bodies before they're old enough to drive. Algorithms built by men, for profit, pitting people against each other because division keeps eyes on screens longer than agreement does.

And underneath that sits something even bigger than the algorithm. A justice system that still, even now, judges victims on how they look, and not in the direction you'd hope. Research into sexual assault trials has found that unattractive victims are judged more harshly, seen as having a more provocative appearance that somehow contributed to their own assault, and assigned more responsibility for what was done to them[^9]. It's not that being attractive protects a victim from suffering, both are equally victims of the same crime, it's that jurors' sympathy and judgement shift depending on how a woman looks, which means the verdict itself can hinge on something that has nothing to do with what actually happened. Jurors have also been shown to weigh beliefs about whether a victim's clothing or behaviour "invited" what happened to her. This isn't ancient history. This is documented, ongoing research into how juries actually think. A ban on a phone doesn't touch that. We need police who believe women the first time, not the fifth. We need juries trained to understand sexual violence properly instead of falling back on instinct and appearance. We need the whole system retrained, not just the apps regulated.

Two women dead every week at the hands of men in this country, and I don't believe that's separate from twenty+ years of boys being fed a version of masculinity that tells them they're owed something women aren't required to give. The ban is one cog. It is not the machine. It needs to sit alongside platform regulation, alongside proper investment in kids who have nowhere else to go, alongside a justice system that finally treats victims as people instead of suspects in their own assault.

I'm not interested in this becoming another front in the culture war, another thing to be furiously right about while everyone else is furiously wrong. I want the people defending this ban and the people genuinely worried about it to actually listen to each other, because most of us want the exact same thing. Children safer. Less hatred. A justice system that works. A way back from a world where being cruel to a stranger online has become normal in a way it never would be standing in front of them.

We're not going to fix that by shouting past each other. We fix it together, or we don't fix it at all.

Receipts

[^1]: Toxic, anti-feminist content was pushed to teenage boy accounts within 23 minutes regardless of what they searched for, sometimes within minutes on individual platforms. DCU Anti-Bullying Centre, Recommending Toxicity, 2024.

[^2]: Seven to eight minutes of pro-anorexia content on TikTok significantly increased body dissatisfaction and internalised beauty standards in young women. Charles Sturt University, published in PLOS One, August 2024.

[^3]: Australia's eSafety Commissioner reported around 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to under-16s were removed or restricted in the first weeks of its ban. eSafety Commissioner, January 2026.

[^4]: A later three-month eSafety review found many children under 16 still have accounts or can create new ones, with close to half of surveyed parents saying their children still had a YouTube account. TechPolicy.Press analysis of eSafety Commissioner three-month report, April 2026.

[^5]: Amnesty International's position that the ban risks treating children as the problem rather than the platforms, and that the real fix is regulating manipulative design. Amnesty International UK, June 2026.

[^6]: 62% of young people support the ban according to the most recent UK Youth Poll, down from 67% in 2025, with around a third opposed. 70% of 25-29 year olds support the ban against just over half of 16-17 year olds. 13-15 year olds were not included in the survey despite Ofcom reporting 95% of that age group are online. John Smith Centre, UK Youth Poll 2026.

[^7]: More than 90% of the 116,211 consultation responses backed the ban, the second most ever after equal marriage. Courthouse News, 15 June 2026.

[^8]: 77% of UK parents with children under 18 support the ban, against 76% of Britons overall, though only 45% think it will be very or quite effective. YouGov, via Techradar, 16 June 2026.

[^9]: Research into sexual assault trials has found attractiveness affects jurors' attribution of blame to victims, with unattractive victims more likely to be seen as having contributed to their own assault. Thornton and Ryckman, cited in Psychology, Crime & Law, and related juror bias research.