Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is expected to ban under-16s from major social media platforms — including TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram — according to BBC News, reported on 14 June 2026.

The move would represent a significant escalation of the UK's regulatory posture toward the major platforms, going beyond the duty-of-care framework already embedded in the Online Safety Act 2023 — which placed a range of new obligations on social media companies to protect both children and adults — toward a hard age-based exclusion. Ofcom, the Act's enforcement body, received updated online safety priorities in November 2024, including a commission to study the effects of social media on children; those findings will now land in politically transformed circumstances.

The scale of the problem the government is seeking to address is not trivial. A joint UK-US statement published in October 2024 found that more than six in ten 13 to 17-year-olds in both countries reported using TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. That statistic, agreed between Technology Secretary Peter Kyle and his US counterpart as part of the first formal UK-US online safety cooperation agreement, has since become a baseline figure in domestic policy discussions. A hard ban for under-16s in the UK would, if enforced, affect a very large share of the adolescent population's current digital habits.

The broader youth policy context

The anticipated social media announcement does not sit in isolation. Since July 2025, the government has been building a parallel, offline infrastructure for young people. Eight Young Futures Hubs were launched in areas with elevated rates of knife crime and antisocial behaviour, offering targeted support to vulnerable young people. A first wave of further hubs opened in April 2026, framed explicitly as a response to the long-run decline in statutory youth services.

The December 2025 National Youth Strategy set out a 10-year plan to give 500,000 more young people access to a trusted adult outside the home and equip them with life skills. The strategy named embedding and delivering the Online Safety Act as one of its pillars — placing digital regulation squarely within a wider welfare agenda rather than treating it as a stand-alone technology question.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has departmental responsibility for the youth strategy portfolio. Any social media age-ban legislation, however, would primarily engage the Technology Secretary's remit, and the precise machinery of a ban — age verification obligations, platform liability, appeals mechanisms — will require primary or secondary legislation that the Online Safety Act's existing framework may or may not be able to accommodate without amendment.

What a ban would require

Technically, an age-based exclusion from specific platforms is harder to enforce than it sounds. Age verification at scale requires either government-issued identity infrastructure, delegated verification to platforms, or a hybrid — each carrying its own data-protection implications under the UK GDPR. Australia legislated a comparable ban for under-16s in late 2024, and its implementation has exposed precisely these tensions between verification rigour and privacy.

The government has not yet published draft legislation, and the BBC report stops short of confirming a timeline. The expectation of a ban is, for now, reported as prime ministerial intent. Whether that intent survives contact with the legislative programme, platform lobbying and civil liberties concerns will become clearer once a Bill is tabled.

What is already settled is the direction of travel. Between the Online Safety Act, the Ofcom children's social media study, the UK-US cooperation agreement, the National Youth Strategy and now the reported intention to legislate an age ban, the present government has assembled more moving parts on children's online safety than any of its predecessors. The question is whether enforcement can catch up with ambition.