{"id":639463,"date":"2026-06-15T07:42:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T07:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/639463\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T07:42:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T07:42:05","slug":"under-16s-to-be-banned-from-social-media-starmer-announces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/639463\/","title":{"rendered":"Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Australia&#8217;s ban &#8211; how does it work?published at 06:28 BST<\/p>\n<p>06:28 BST<\/p>\n<p>      <img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Two teenage boys look at their smartphone screens.\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/e5e474c5-a90f-40b5-8da6-fcd00d34d5fd.jpg.webp\"  width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" class=\"ssrcss-egie1y-Image edrdn950\"\/>Image source, Getty Images<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Last December, Australia brought in a ban on social media for all under-16s, stopping children from using platforms like Tiktok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Threads.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Following the introduction of the ban, under-16s are now not able to set up new accounts and their existing profiles were deactivated.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Australia became the first country in the world to do this.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">So, how is the ban enforced?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Children and parents aren&#8217;t punished for breaking the rules. Instead, social media companies face fines of up to A$49.5m (US $32m, \u00a325m) for serious or repeated breaches.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The government says firms must take &#8220;reasonable steps&#8221; to keep children off their platforms, using several age assurance technologies.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">These could include government IDs, face or voice recognition, or &#8220;age inference&#8221;, which analyses online behaviour to estimate a person&#8217;s age.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Platforms can&#8217;t rely on users self-certifying or parents vouching for their children.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">As a reminder, Starmer says the UK would &#8220;go further&#8221; than Australia with additional measures including curfews for older teenagers and restrictions on AI chatbots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia&#8217;s ban &#8211; how does it work?published at 06:28 BST 06:28 BST Image source, Getty Images Last December,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278751,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-639463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}