Andy Burnham’s narrow path on social media

With Parliament resuming its work, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham will have to formalise a bill to ban social media for under-16s. The measure is a legacy of his predecessor, Keir Starmer, who announced in June that he wished to introduce an age limit in the UK modelled on the Australian system, declaring himself “unwilling to compromise on the safety and wellbeing of teenagers”. A week later, he resigned, and now the onus is on the new Prime Minister – who is, incidentally, very active on social media – to bring the initiative to fruition, at a time when the strategy based on age restrictions appears less popular and is beginning to pose some dilemmas.

A significant turning point came two weeks ago from the French Constitutional Council, which struck down the bill that would have introduced a ban on the use of social media by children under the age of fifteen, deeming it too broad and detrimental to freedom of expression. Despite differences between legal systems, the risk that a ban of this kind would face legal obstacles is high, and this is primarily due to the difficulty of defining the meaning of ‘social network’ and of delineating the scope of the digital services to be restricted. In the only country where such a ban is in force – Australia, from which the UK explicitly draws inspiration – 81 per cent of teenagers under the age of sixteen continue to use social media, according to data published in July by eSafety, the Australian regulatory body for online safety. In a short space of time, what was considered the only possible way to protect children online has begun to prove problematic and ineffective. There is also a more general question of appropriateness: in the UK, sixteen is the minimum voting age. The idea that young people up to the age of sixteen are stripped of responsibility and excluded from spaces that inevitably help to shape public debate – and are then called upon to participate in democratic life – is a contradiction that warrants closer scrutiny.