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This week, Keir Starmer confirmed the UK is moving ahead with a social media ban for under-16s, covering platforms including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook and Snapchat. If passed, it comes into effect by spring 2027.
It is one of the most talked-about policy announcements in tech this year, and the debate it has sparked goes far beyond child safety. At Standing on Giants, we believe the internet works better when it works for people. So we asked our co-founder Robbie Hearn for his take.
What’s the biggest problem with social media? It’s not the horrific content, it’s the business model behind that content. A business model that exploits all of us, not just the young. The features built into 21st century social media hack our stone-age emotions to keep us glued to our screens, in order to serve a maximalist profit-motive that crushes our individual and societal interests.
The only way to deal with this problem is government intervention targeted at the way the tech companies that currently dominate this technology operate. Whether that’s by regulation of the platform features themselves; by breaking up monopolistic corporate structures; by subsidising pro-social alternatives; or by some combination of these and, perhaps, completely new measures that are up to the scale and importance of this task.
The debate on social media bans for children is the current front line in a much bigger debate that will affect the future for all of us. That debate is about the future of the internet itself, and its role in our lives.
I am on the side of writers on this debate such as Cory Doctorow (Enshittification, 2025), Sir Tim Berners-Lee (This is for Everyone, 2025), Parmy Olson (AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World, 2024), and Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism, 2023). And the fact that Jaron Lanier was making a version of this argument back in 2013 in Who Owns the Future? is a reminder that this is not a new problem. We have just been very slow to act on it.
The internet (and indeed Social Media within that) can be a wonderful tool for human thriving. But if we want that, we need government action way more radical than banning social media for under 16s.
