The UK backs off banning social media for youths under age 16 (for now). Ban-teens alarmists are treating their defeat like Armageddon

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| April 2026

The total ban’s failure creates an “emergency,” a top UK official trumpets. “So what will protect kids online?” a liberal-media headline wails.

The United Kingdom’s drastic Online Safety Act – which took effect in 2023 – already requires online platforms “to use highly effective age assurance to prevent children from accessing pornography, or content which encourages self-harm, suicide or eating disorder content” and “other harmful and age-inappropriate content such as bullying, hateful content and content which encourages dangerous stunts or ingesting dangerous substances.”

Its backers promised the OSA would “protect children” from these enumerated bad things on the internet. Now, those same backers clarion the OSA has failed abysmally (as its critics predicted it would): teens are accessing more pornography today than before.

So, hell, just ban under-16s from all social media, good and bad. If something doesn’t work, do more of it.

The “more of it” is a total ban on under-16s accessing social media. It failed in the House of Commons 307-173 (107 abstentions), with Labour MPs awaiting more “study.”

OMG. You’d think the Black Plague had erupted in Soho.

The shadow Conservative education secretary declared the ban’s temporary failure creates a dire “emergency”. “No more guidance, no more consultations. Legislate, do something about it,” she said. An expert called for “urgent protection.” Labour supporters declared “parents are…locked in a daily battle that they simply cannot win alone.” “Ever-escalating risk and bad behaviour… is infiltrating our, and our children’s, phones,” another, presented as a skeptic, agreed.

The liberal Huff Post UK bewailed the ban’s failure, not even feigning objectivity: “We all know the myriad arguments for banning social media (addictive design; disruption to sleep, attention and mental health; exposure to harmful or distressing content; and opening kids up to bullying or abuse),” the article read. So, given the ban’s failure, “What will protect kids online?”

Are these people losing their minds, or am I?

Viewing the panicked moral frenzy over teens and social media afflicting much of world, I am at total, baffled loss. Am I missing some huge point the rampant panickers made somewhere I didn’t see?

Social media is not even remotely dangerous for young people. Get a grip and remember: “social media” consists of a screen.

However, the offline world is provably dangerous, especially for young people victimized by adult abusers in physical, face-to-face situations.

The dangers presented by screens are nothing compared to what real life presents children and teens. This fact is amply proven by Big Law attorneys who have severe problems finding real-life plaintiffs even after ubiquitous pitches like: “Was Your Child or Teenager Harmed Due to Social Media? You May Be Entitled to Money!”).

The attorneys general lawsuits and Meta trial in the US show graphically that teens kidnaped, raped, abused, drug-addicted, and mentally harmed by social media are vanishingly rare to begin with. In fact, the poster “victim” of “social media addiction” presented by a well-resourced law firm was so demonstrably traumatized by years of severe parental violent and emotional abuses that even her attorneys admitted social media contributed at most a “small bit” to her childhood tragedy. And this was the best case skilled lawyers could find to bring to the witness stand.

Growing research and cases are demolishing a decade of histrionics (“Smartphones are destroying a generation!” “Social media is “rewiring childhood!” Teens’ going online an “emergency” demanding “urgent’ banishment! on and on). Big Law firms enticed by big-money litigation are proving unable to find demonstrable victims among the hundreds of millions of children and youth using social media hours daily.

How can panickers keep ignoring real dangers to young people?

Few realize how dramatically safer the world has become for teenagers over the last two decades. You don’t hear about it because the press and authorities operate under rigid rules that forbid honest reporting on teen issues unless/until it would benefit a major interest. Otherwise, teens must always be depicted as bad and getting worse.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control numbers below show the amazing improvements in teen safety during the internet era.

Table 1. US teen problems as a percent of all Americans’ problems

Sources: CDC 1999-2024, 1968-1998; FBI 2026.

– In 1995, virtually no teenagers used social media and none had smartphones. Back then, by most key measures, teens were a high-risk population.

– In 2024, over 90% of teens accessed social media and smartphones. Now, by every key measure, teens are a low-risk population.

Even amid an increase of nearly 6 million in the US population age 10-19 from 1995 to 2024, the proportion of teen involvements (proportion is used to factor out general safety changes over the period) in major risks plummeted dramatically, both absolutely and compared to adults.

From 1995 to 2024, US teenagers’ violent deaths fell by 4,444 per year, and criminal arrests plunged by nearly 2.8 million per year, both down an astounding 62% relative to adult trends. (I know that sounds incredible; check the figures yourselves).

For accidents, homicides, gun deaths, all violent deaths, and crime, per-capita rates of these problems among teens also fell dramatically or rose much less rapidly than adult rates for suicides and drug overdose.

Correlation, of course, does not equal causation. Whether being online more caused or simply contributed to varying degrees for the vast improvements in teenagers’ safety and law-abiding behaviors compared to adults’ (rigid self-imposed rules prohibit such comparisons in press and authorities’ forums) is a good subject for further analysis.

But the bottom line is that teenage behavior and safety improved dramatically as social media use skyrocketed. We can calculate the increased danger simply from transferring the hours spent online to hours spent in the “real world.”

Suppose the ban-teens-from-social-media lobby got its way completely…

… and all persons under age 16 (and later, 18, then 21; these lobbies are not going to stop) were forced away from screens to spend the same average 3-4 hours a day with their families, in sports, at church, in parks, at malls, whatever scenario of idyllic “screen-free childhood” advocates dream of.

Cold statistics predict that forcing tens of millions of US teenagers to transfer the hours they spend online to spending those same hours with their families and outside amid people would result in many thousands’ more children and teens killed in homicides, accidents, by guns, and in violent crimes. Hundreds of thousands to millions more would be abused, injured, sexually assaulted, and traumatized every year. Centers for Disease Control surveys further predict more suicides by teens, since girls in particular who use social media many hours a day are less likely to harm themselves and attempt suicide than girls who don’t go online.

One could shrug, well duh – sitting in front of a screen is going to be much less risky than being outside on the streets and in the wilds. But that is exactly my point about what is beyond clinically insane about today’s debates in Parliament, Congress, and media and official forums: august leaders seriously insist teens are so perilously endangered online that banishing them from social media is an “urgent” priority.

Can small screens present some terrible things? Of course.

Four in 10 teens encounter “explicit content,” whatever that means, on smartphones, the UK Conservative shadow education secretary warns (really? that few?).

Will the secretary tell us what kind of “explicit content” hundreds of thousands of teenagers encounter from violent, abusive Church of England, Catholic Church, youth organization, police, school, other personnel, and – especially – family members? What bans does she propose to combat those real “emergencies”? No church before age 18? No sports? No school? No going home?

“Domestic abuse, stalking and sexual assault affected 5.1 million victims in the year ending March 2025,” including over 70,000 rapes by men overwhelmingly victimizing girls and women, the UK’s latest Home Office report declares.

The UK Office of National Statistics report that 45% of female and 60% of male victims of sexual offenses are under age 20 has won frantic attention by demagogues proclaiming that youths must be abusing each other. But, weirdly, the ONS’s companion report that persons under age 20 comprise just 18% of sexual-offense perpetrators (down slightly from 5 years ago) is never mentioned.

Instead, officials led by PM Starmer incessantly hype Netflix’s fictional “Adolescence” series as some kind of proof that teenage misogynists “radicalised” by social media are wantonly stabbing girls. This is the pit into which civic discourse has sunk.

The lost argument for balance

All this said, I strongly support more children, teens, and adults (like myself) spending more time outdoors and less time online. That I am here in front of a screen instead of in the beautiful California Sierra outside my window calls my priorities into deep question.

The safety of the buffered social media world along with its enhanced information, expression, and contacts offer large benefits of one kind. The vitality – and sometimes risk – of offline, real-world life offer other kinds of crucial benefits.

“Online and offline belonging are deeply interconnected rather than competing forces,” the first study to ask teens to characterize their larger lives concluded. “The concept of the ‘hybrid reality’” in which the “offline world …is woven dynamically and interactively with online contexts in a single holistic ecosystem” is the true description of adolescents’ experiences, another study found. What a refreshing contrast to the narrow zero-sum primitivism of official/media panic.

Big Tech – Meta, Google, X, Apple, Anthropic, etc. – eagerly supports bans and restrictions on teens’ internet use. Why? Because “age verification” identity requirements greatly enhance media giants’ and governments’ profitable information gathering on users (especially children), their hegemonic crushing of smaller platforms, and their censorship of political content they don’t like.

Fortunately, UK youth have proven adept at protecting their own well-being by defying ill-motivated, ill-considered “online safety” measures. That’s a skill we can hope younger generations teach the rest of us in these rising authoritarian times.