Keir Starmer’s British government has been cursed with a long to-do list on which almost every bullet point is deeply unpopular. A ban on social media for teens, on the other hand, is uncomplicatedly supported by the public. The relief was discernible in the prime minister’s voice when he said it would “give children their childhood back.”

There are plenty of reasons to agree that social media is indeed making children unhappy and unsafe. But bans fueled by moral certainty and high purpose are the easy part. The unpleasant stuff comes later: enforcement, dealing with side-effects, restraining yourself from letting controls multiply across the internet.

Also Read: How will the UK ban on social media for under 16s work?

Britain’s ban — which officials promise will go harder and further than in other nations such as Australia — is an iteration of the same knee-jerk paternalism that led the country to introduce a generational ban on cigarettes. There is, however, a global trend here, first visible in India, of treating social media as a danger too important to be left to markets and the unpoliced internet. And the reasons go way beyond the instinct to protect citizens from harm.

TikTok, for example, has been banned in India since 2020, and was almost blocked by the US as well. Indian politicians saw prohibition as a way of striking back against China, where the app’s parent company ByteDance is based. American officials worried about Beijing’s data-harvesting and its ability to nudge an entire generation toward disaffection and nihilism.


Where things have evolved is that the perceived threat is no longer a specific app from a particular foreign adversary. Many in the West have come to think of big tech companies in general as meddling and irresponsible, and reckon the American giants are just as untrustworthy to chaperone our kids as Beijing.
This is a much broader fear, and makes the chances of successful limits far slimmer. You might be able to block a list of Chinese apps, as India has done pretty effectively, yet managing every teenager’s internet access is a Herculean task. India’s TikTok ban did not stop people from gawking at short videos. They kept at it, shifting swiftly and smartly, in the way youngsters do, to other apps. These were mostly American platforms, whose vast resources make them formidable opponents for anyone eager to police them.Also Read: UAE announces social media ban for under-15s, joining growing trend

Britain’s under-16s will surely be just as ingenious as their Indian peers. They may shift away from certain leading apps to others, or to bulletin boards and forums. Many will discover VPNs and location spoofing, or borrow an older sibling’s phone or account. And they will be aided in this quest by online actors — malign or indifferently profit-seeking — who still want to reach them: advertisers, ideologues and predators. Teens’ online world may paradoxically become tougher to oversee and regulate.

So what happens next? Those implementing limits in Britain or elsewhere will soon recognize that a light-touch approach to age verification will leave gaps that some kids fall through. When that happens — and the ferocious tabloid media will find enough examples to make it sound like an epidemic — regulators will need to decide on whether to further tighten their grip.

The UK could move toward a universal digital identity needed to access the internet, or it might even ban VPNs. Schools, parents or siblings may be held responsible if they openly allow or encourage kids to circumvent the ban.

There are real costs, too, that policymakers will not have counted. When India banned TikTok, it changed the creator economy. ByteDance’s algorithm had done a valuable thing by pushing forward the unexpected, the amateur and the disempowered. Random young people from India’s disconnected and forgotten small towns became stars. Once TikTok was banished, YouTube and Instagram replaced all that with the more familiar landscape of manufactured and big-spending influencers. Nobody predicted that.

We do not yet know what Britain’s ban, and others like it, will cost a generation in terms of self-expression and community. The same evidence base that demonstrates social media’s capacity for harm also shows that “the buffering effects against [real world] stress that online social support from peers may provide can be especially important for youth who are often marginalized, including racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minorities.”

It is possible that, in the end, this ban will work. Perhaps teenagers will indeed put down their phones and go outside; or at least stop having the most noxious ideologies thrust on them before they are old enough to develop proper British cynicism. But in India, at least, banning TikTok didn’t turn back the clock. It just changed how the internet molded people.