I was 14 years old when I first created a Facebook account for myself. My mum said it was okay so long as she knew the password. I mostly used it to play Farmville, poke my friends, and post webcam photos that I thought made me look cool (they didn’t). Instagram took off a couple of years later, and I had an account where I posted over-edited photos that I’d take on my digital camera: Lomo-fi filter on, saturation up, a paragraph of hashtags in the caption, some conviction that this was the post that would get more than ten likes, and we were good to go.

These were the halcyon days of social media, and I remember them fondly. I never felt as though I was in danger and, thankfully, was never preyed upon, groomed, or abused online. The closest I ever got was a DM from a foot fetish account asking if I’d like to be featured on their page—a request that was provoked by a photo I had posted of my feet in the sand at the beach, and innocently hashtagged “#feet.” It felt weird but harmless, mostly funny, and after imagining what the picture might look like in a wall of well-manicured lady feet I took the photo down and forgot about the whole thing.

Instagram was just a place for me to post, and look at photos of cherry blossom, sunsets and latte art. I spent a handful of hours using social media each week, and would go days, sometimes a week, without checking it. I followed so few people that after five minutes of scrolling through my Instagram feed the app would kindly tell me “you’re all caught up,” giving me a cue to exit. I even remember telling myself to wait longer before visiting the app next so that there would be more for me to see. If there was no reason to stay, no content creator or infinite scroll to keep me there, I would find something else to do—though my options did include a chatroom that would randomly pair you with a stranger (their tagline was “Talk to Strangers!,” eek). Despite a brief encounter with that obvious creep den, which was since closed down due to a lack of child safety, my teenage engagement with social media was mostly wholesome.

Skip to today, and a social media ban has just been announced for under-16s in the UK and will come into effect in spring 2027. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube, Twitch, Kick and some other platform names I don’t recognize will be off limits for young people under 16s, along with livestreaming and communication with strangers on gaming sites like Roblox. It follows a consultation of 116,000 people—including 54,000 parents and 14,000 children—where nine in ten parents said they’d support a ban. Restrictions will stay on by default for 16- and 17-year-olds on the major social media apps (to prevent a “cliff edge” scenario when teenagers turned 16, the government has said) and limits on infinite scrolling and social media curfews are also under consideration for that age group.

The ban is positioned as a response to escalating mental health crises, the addictive design of tech platforms, and the failure of tech companies to adequately protect minors from online predators and extreme content. It feels legitimate enough on the surface—online platforms are causing real harm to young people, and so it follows that young people should cease to engage with these platforms. But big voices, including The Children’s Coalition for Online Safety and Child Rights International Network (CRIN), are highly critical of the ban, claiming that it’s more about optics than what is actually good for children. “[Bans] put the burden on children, instead of tackling the harmful business models of social media platforms,” writes CRIN. “A very broad range of child protection and children’s rights experts agree that bans are the wrong approach.”

The reaction among the affected age group has been polarised. Opinions presented in UK media vary, from: “I welcome a social media ban, although I am sceptical of its effectiveness” and “I think I’d have been a lot happier and less self-conscious without social media” to “[It’s not] our fault that the internet is an unsafe place" and “restrictions are needed—but more on the companies providing the services than the children using them.” Usually, kids and teenagers are more perceptive than we perhaps give them credit for. And although 14,000 children completed the consultation, they were outnumbered 8 to 1 by adults in the process.

They understand the downsides of smartphones and social media, but appreciate the value of resources like YouTube for learning. They know it’s complicated, that social media is dangerous and that they’re not capable of managing harm alone, but there’s also a strong sense of injustice underpinning their responses. Why are things being taken away from us because of problems that social media companies created? Why are we being denied access to tools that give us opportunities to create, share, learn, and connect, just because Mark Zuckerberg is insidious and refuses to be held accountable even though he could spend a million dollars a day for 649 years before going broke?

As Keir Starmer packs his suitcase and the UK government winds into its next political transition, our ministers should be asking themselves the same questions. The UK’s social media ban risks shifting responsibility away from platforms, and on to children. Companies like Meta have got more than enough money to pour into designing a child-friendly algorithm that prioritizes safety and protection. Hell, they could even save themselves all that money by giving the kids Instagram version one, the version I had access to, the one without the infinite scroll or the personalised ads (surely that still exists on a hard drive somewhere?), the one with the cherry blossom and friendly foot fetish pages. Show them their friends’ content, then tell them they’re all caught up when they’ve seen it all instead of keeping them there on purpose. Give them an exit cue, kill the infinite scroll, and stop building addictive things that ruin kids’ brain chemicals. Then they might just be alright.