A Canada-style ban would put a lot of pressure on online safety regulator Ofcom to assess whether platforms are safe for use, but a blanket ban would put a lot of pressure on the government to get the criteria right — a tall order, given how quickly technology, and the risks associated with it, evolve.
There is support from influential campaign groups for the Canada model. In May, a coalition of civil society groups, including the pro-ban Smartphone Free Childhood and anti-ban Molly Rose Foundation, managed to unite around the principle that platforms should earn the right to offer their services to children by meeting strict safety standards. “In many ways, this is a more future-proof approach than simply banning individual social media apps,” Smartphone Free Childhood noted.
Will it protect children?
While Starmer says the social media ban is designed to protect children, his ministers have spent a lot of time acknowledging that it probably won’t work.
“I want to be honest about this: Kids will get around [the ban],” Kendall said last month.
The government insists that children who manage to get around the ban still be protected by the Online Safety Act, under which online services must have systems and processes in place to protect children from harmful content.
The problem, though, is that under-16s who use VPNs or their parents’ accounts to circumvent the ban will be treated by the platforms they access as if they were adults, so the current OSA protections won’t apply. This could lead to the perverse outcome that under-16s wind up being less, rather than more, protected.
Whatever happens, Burnham’s incoming government will need to steer an increasingly complex online safety regime.