Last week the government announced its ban on social media for children with a press release titled: Social media to be banned for under-16s in landmark government move to give kids their childhood back.
The obviously emotive final line undoubtedly caused a collective sigh of relief among the many parents facing the daily strain of trying to police their children’s online activity. According to Ofcom, 68% of children aged 3-17 use social media apps and 40% of under 13s hold accounts on platforms where they are under the minimum age.
What the headline didn’t reveal, is that for this legislation to work, everyone in the United Kingdom will now have to prove who they are to the state, to use the internet. In the words of The Spectator’s John Power: “Internet anonymity is now impossible.” A free society making participation in everyday digital life conditional on identity verification by the state, platforms or commercial age-assurance providers, is unchartered territory for the UK. It may be justified in narrow, high-risk contexts, however as a general operating model for the internet, it is a very different proposition. Indeed, it raises the profound question of how much power we wish to hand to our government.
While the state’s intent to protect children from harmful content and addictive screen time was broadly welcomed at TMC, opinions varied as to how the legislation could impact ourselves, our children, the brands we work with and ultimately our working lives.
Graphic designer Lydia Fletcher, grew up in the ‘wild west’, early days of unrestricted social media, signing up from age ten for platforms including MSN, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and in her words “the worst thing to happen to social media” notorious cyberbullying platform – AskFM.
“It sounds ridiculous but I am still to this day seeing things I posted at that age and having to remove them due to my naivety at the time and the access people now have to your history,”
“I think we forget at that age you often haven’t grown to the level of maturity needed, to post and comment on things. I think this is why the ban is really important, giving children hope for the future. Hope that when they enter the employed world, the things they did when they were teenagers will merely be memories rather than inked into social media like a bad cloud. Who knows what kind of access employers will have in the future, including the ability to track everything you’ve engaged with.”
Rather than a blanket ban, others have suggested the onus for change should come from within the social media companies. Indeed, had the mental wellbeing of children being approached responsibly from the outset, arguably we would not be in a position where the state feels forced to step in.
Diana Stephenson, Head of PR commented: “I would like to see more of a focus on the algorithms used to target children and the social media companies taking more responsibility for the type of content they are pumping out to young people (and everyone for that matter). Parents also need to take more responsibility for their children’s online behaviour and what they are looking at. And finally – the tech companies need to be far more responsive to complaints and taking down harmful content.”
One argument shut down by Kier Starmer when announcing the ban, was that making something illegal, such as smoking and drinking, could make it more irresistible to children.
Senior Account Manager Jessie Fulham, suggested it could also “make the transition to using social media worse once they turn 16, and make them more vulnerable because all the younger kids who aren’t yet on it, then get onto it and don’t really know how to use it. It’s like anything in life, if it’s not accessible, it makes it more desirable. Although I do think that some of the younger generations attitudes are changing the more they are educated.”
Adrian Whitehurst, Director of Strategy and Technology pointed out that there is a precedent for this level of government intervention: “The obvious comparison is alcohol during the prohibition era. Alcohol did not disappear because it was banned. It moved into speakeasies, informal networks and criminal markets. The lesson is not that alcohol was harmless; it is that poorly designed bans can create worse incentives, weaker oversight and more dangerous environments than the ones they were intended to replace. The same risk applies here. This will not necessarily stop under-16s accessing social media. It may simply push them towards VPNs, spoofed accounts, borrowed identities, sideloaded apps, encrypted communities or the dark web and “.onion”. Living with a digital native 13-year-old, I feel very uncomfortable with a law that is likely to drive curious adolescents to explore nefarious parts of the internet.”
What does it mean for marketing agencies and their brands?
Well certainty a shift in approach and a perhaps ‘not so sad’ farewell to children marketing to children under the guise of ‘influencers’. To reach under 16s, brands who have previously targeted children directly on social media platforms will now have to re-think their strategies, perhaps creating content that appeals to those holding the purse strings instead. UK advertising rules banning brands from making direct appeals to children to buy products or to persuade adults to buy for them remain unchanged, so they will certainly have to get creative!
A resurgence of spend on TV advertising during prime-time family viewing could be on the cards and the creation of more all-encompassing multi-generational advertising. Is that a bad thing? Probably not. Shaking things up in our experience, often leads to greater creativity, new ideas and innovative approaches. There are plenty of ways to market to children positively offline and it would be great to see more brands investing in opportunities that could benefit wider society as a whole – school investment partnerships, education programmes, scholarship opportunities etc., could all be used to benefit future generations.
Marketing Executive Meredith Stephenson raised an interesting question about influencers: “Some of the influencers/TikTok creators I come across seem to have quite a broad audience, including followers as young as 13+, so if they lose a significant chunk of their following, could that make them less appealing to brands?”
In short, yes. This ban will not affect all influencers equally. It will affect creators whose value depends on teen and pre-teen reach, trend seeding, youth culture, gaming, beauty, fashion, music, school-life content or fan communities, far more than creators whose audiences are mainly adult purchasers. As for the thousands of Under 16s in the UK who have built followings as creators and monetised their presence online, it will be interesting to see what happens. Content could still be created via parental accounts, but with a declining child audience, their role within the creator community will be significantly curtailed.
And what of the social media companies?
How will they re-strategise for a customer base they now cannot directly reach until they’re 16?
It’s unlikely they will be able to resist ‘warming up’ legions of future users, so it will be fascinating to see the approaches taken to winning over children as they reach the cliff-edge at 16. Perhaps they will work on building parental trust by repositioning themselves as responsible institutions, focus on raising their educational legitimacy or simply work on brand familiarity through traditional advertising routes or the creation of new non-social products. Undoubtedly, there will be some rogue brands that take the riskier route of pushing children towards ban-workarounds such as VPNs, but intelligent brand strategists will, we suspect, focus on selling trust, transparency and protection to parents, positioning themselves as the safest bet when Sweet 16 comes around.
“Responsible brands should not be nudging under-16s towards circumvention,” added Adrian. “But nor should we pretend this policy neatly removes young people from digital culture. It does not. The more constructive route is to address the architecture of harm: addictive product design, algorithmic content escalation, weak moderation, poor complaint handling, exploitative data practices, stranger contact and the commercial incentives that reward attention at any cost. That is where regulation should be focused. Parents need better tools, children need better education, platforms need harder duties, and society needs better offline alternatives. But a blunt ban risks mistaking invisibility for safety.”
In healthcare communications for TMC clients, we understand the difference between prevention and harm reduction. You rarely solve complex behavioural problems by pretending the behaviour can be wished away. You design systems that reduce risk, improve visibility, support better decisions and keep people within safer environments.
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