By Dr Issy Bray, Dr Moya Lerigo-Sampson and Dr Yvette Morey
As Australia introduced a “world-first” ban on social media for under-16s last month and political momentum in the UK is building to consider similar action. We ask will such a ban protect young people’s wellbeing or create new risks?
The burden of mental disorders in children and young people is increasing worldwide, a trend certainly worsened by the Covid pandemic. Research points to a range of contributing factors, including intergenerational inequality, climate pressure, insecure work and social media.
While we cannot stop the march of technological progress, the effects of constant exposure to social media during childhood and adolescence remain largely unknown. However many feel strongly that social media, and the use of electronic devices more generally, is detrimental to development and wellbeing for children and adolescents.
Against this backdrop, the Australian government introduced its “world-first” social media ban for under-16s on 10 December 2025. Affecting major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, the ban prohibits new accounts and requires deactivation of existing ones.
What does the ban aim to do?
While Australia’s ban on under-16’s engagement with social media is unlikely to be popular with young people themselves, the establishment is clear that it does not wish to punish young people – the aim is to protect them.
It is the social media companies that are targeted by the new legislation, which imposes monetary penalties if they fail to take reasonable steps to prevent minors under 16 from having social media accounts in Australia.
However, the Australian Human Rights Commission has indicated that the legislation is potentially in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Digital Freedom Project, a civil liberties group, has announced that it will take legal action against the new laws, saying they violate the right to political communication.
The double-edged nature of social media
Most technological innovations have positive and negative implications. For example, during the Covid pandemic, social media was widely recognised to be a source of support and a way of connecting with others. At the same time as polarising heated debates around lockdown measures such as school closures and travel restrictions.
For many, unable to get out and enjoy their normal life, it encouraged social comparisons that led to dissatisfaction with their lockdown life and, for a minority, it fuelled body dissatisfaction leading to obsessive exercise regimes or disordered eating behaviours.
How will young people be affected?
The situation is not black and white. The balance between benefit and harm may well depend on who you are and where you live.
Approximately 90% of Australians live in urban centres (covering 0.22% of the land mass). The remaining 10% are dispersed in remote rural and coastal communities separated by huge distances.
For a teenager living in the outback, social media might be an important source of information, friendship and connection with the wider world.
As this ban is implemented it will be important to listen to the experiences of young people of different ages and living in different circumstances, to understand how social connection and loneliness are affected and to ensure that socio-economic inequalities are not increased.
How social media is used matters
More subtly, research suggests that the effects of social media depend on how it is used. For example for keeping in touch with loved ones (referred to as ‘active use’), or for viewing images of people we are less well acquainted with, such as social media influencers (‘passive use’), often with negative consequences such as comparing ourselves to others.
Certain sites are more conducive to passive than active use, but one problem with any attempt to research or regulate the use of social media is the speed at which individual platforms appear and then get overtaken. It is an ever-changing landscape, particularly where digital natives are concerned.
However, the Australian legislation allows the government to determine over time which social media platforms must ban age restricted users, meaning that in theory at least it can respond to the emergence of new platforms and data about who is using them and for what purpose. One possible hitch is that the companies themselves own this data.
Is Australia really a “world-first”?
Is the Australian government’s move as ground-breaking as it seems? In the UK and US, existing under-13 age limits already exist but are poorly enforced. In reality many under 13s have had access to social media (one survey estimated the figure to be 43%).
But as of 25 July 2025, the new Online Safety Act (2023/2025) requires platforms to use ‘age assurance’ methods such as ID checks or facial scans.
Politically, it will surely be easier to enforce existing legislation than to implement a new ban in the UK, but it is likely to require a cultural shift that so far been missing. And while the world watches Australia, we would do well to monitor the effects of this stricter enforcement of our own rules.
Protecting young people from harmful content
Critics argue that there is a less radical way to protect young people and that is to specifically protect them from harmful content.
Research carried out by NSPCC reported that more than one in four children had seen content on Facebook and YouTube that contained suicide, violence, bullying, sexual and other adult themes. Such issues have been highlighted recently by tragic suicides, in which young people have been influenced by online communities and exposed to content giving advice on methods of self-harm, and by conversations about pornography, in which dangerous practices such as choking are portrayed as ‘normal’. Prominent voices are calling for a total ban on such material.
The role of the Online Safety Act
In response to these concerns, the Online Safety Act also makes social media companies responsible for protecting under 18s from harmful content. It states that children must be prevented from accessing pornography or content that encourages, promotes or provides instructions for self-harm, eating disorders or suicide.
Ofcom is now the regulator of online safety and responsible for monitoring how effective companies are at protecting internet users from harm. As yet however, there is little information available about how successfully the Online Safety Act has been enforced.
Screen time, wellbeing and alternatives
A recent survey of 16-21 year olds carried out by Ofcom found that two-thirds spend more than two hours on social media every day.
The majority of respondents said they felt worse about themselves after spending time online and approximately half would prefer to be young in a world without the internet.
Protecting children from harmful online content tackles certain serious threats to young people’s wellbeing, but it will not materially alter the amount of time spent online (for over 13s at least).
There are many who argue that reducing screen time would improve young people’s wellbeing not only because of the content they see online, but because they hope it will encourage more time to be spent outdoors in nature, being physically active and interacting with others without the filter of a screen.
A ban on social media for under-16s is one way of doing that, but there are others. Banning use of phones in schools for example, as some schools have trialled in the UK, or introducing a social media curfew. Our government has so far stopped short of introducing these measures.
When we compare ourselves to Australia, will we begin to see a divergence in trends in mental health concerns of young people following the ban?
Learning from Australia
The acknowledgement that social media can be beneficial for wellbeing, and the insights that research offers into how it can be used more positively, suggest that there may be evidence-based alternatives to an outright ban. Such as education-based initiatives that support social media literacy in families.
Australia’s ban provides a natural experiment from which other governments, including our own, should be willing to learn from to make balanced policy decisions based on the evidence that emerges.
The authors have conducted extensive research on social media, including recent work showing that the lives of influencers are often more demanding than they appear (read more about the study).