Sir Keir Starmer has summoned technology bosses to Downing Street today to discuss whether they are doing enough to safeguard children from online harms and have fully implemented the Online Safety Act.
The summit is a response to growing calls for the UK to follow Australia in banning under-16s from social media. It also shows that the Government is edging towards a ban, despite rejecting attempts by the House of Lords to introduce one.
There are good reasons why that pressure has built. The evidence linking social media to anxiety, bullying, harmful content, the spread of non-consensual AI-generated imagery and growing crime of sextortion of children has become harder to dismiss with each passing year.
For example, in 2025, the UK’s Report Remove Service received 1,894 reports from children and young people about nude or sexual imagery of themselves, a 66 per cent increase year-on-year.
Of those reports where child sexual abuse imagery was confirmed (1,175 cases), 34 per cent (394 reports) involved an element of sextortion, a 34 per cent rise from 2024. While boys aged 14–17 accounted for 98 per cent of sextortion victims.
Worryingly, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) described the current figures as merely the “tip of the iceberg” of online safety challenges.
The Prime Minister’s intervention also suggests that Online Safety Act, which was supposed to mark a decisive shift, has struggled to keep pace with the speed of technological change.
The government’s talks with tech executives, and the parallel push to tighten the law around sexually explicit deepfakes and similar abuse, reflect a political system trying to catch up with a problem that keeps mutating faster than ministers can legislate or regulate.
But this is also where the debate becomes more complicated than a headline-grabbing ban.
One of the most compelling interventions comes from Wayne Holdsworth of SmackTalk, whose argument carries particular force because it is not abstract. Holdsworth speaks from personal tragedy after the loss of his son, Mac.
That loss has shaped a message which is both deeply human and politically difficult to ignore: a ban may be useful, but it is not enough. The central point he has pressed is that education is the vital component of equipping young people with the skills they need to navigate social media safely.
This distinction matters. A legal restriction can set a boundary and give parents some support, but if children and parents are not taught how online platforms work, how algorithms pull them in, how exploitation happens and how to protect themselves, then we are only dealing with the surface of the problem and delaying it until a child hits 16.
That is the weakness in any ban-only strategy. Social media is not a sealed front door that can simply be locked. It is a sprawling, adaptable ecosystem where age-spoofing, workarounds, and VPNs can quickly undermine the spirit of the law.
A ban may stop some use and slow some exposure, and I do not dismiss that. But it can also create a false sense of resolution in politics, the sense that Parliament has passed a law and therefore the problem has been substantially solved. It has not. Holdsworth’s warning, as I read it, is that unless education sits at the centre of the response, children may simply migrate into less visible corners of the online world, where the risks are greater and adult oversight is weaker.
There is also a practical challenge which those tech bosses will have been only too ready to raise in Downing Street. Any under-16 ban relies on age verification, and age verification means data. Companies say they are being asked to prove who users are without creating fresh privacy concerns around biometric checks, ID documents or other sensitive personal information.
Ministers, meanwhile, want to sound tough on child safety without drifting into a debate about digital identity that many voters find intrusive. That tension is real. If the state demands more intrusive checks, it risks one backlash; if it settles for weaker enforcement, it risks building a law that is porous from the outset.
The broader contradiction in all this is one Westminster still has not fully resolved. Britain wants to present itself as pro-innovation, pro-AI and attractive to global investment, while also taking an increasingly interventionist line on the digital sphere.
Starmer is trying to hold both positions at once: reassure the industry that the UK remains open for business, and reassure parents and MPs that the government is willing to confront Silicon Valley when children’s welfare is at stake.
Politically and economically, that balancing act may be necessary – But trying to reconcile these competing policies is making the Prime Minister look weak and indecisive. It will also allow opposition MPs to continue to bash the Government for failing to act and when, as many MPs we have spoken to believe Labour will introduce a ban, allow them to claim victory in forcing another U-turn.
Is the Government is moving towards a social media ban?
