The fightback against social media is on. Globally. Bit late, some might say. Australia started the revolution in December 2025 and banned all children under 16 from signing up and/or using social media platforms. Four months later, the stats are in. And they’re not great.
As of Monday 13th April 2026, it turns out that two-thirds of underage Australians are still using social media despite the ban that came into effect last December. It’s not that they’ve circumvented any age restrictions mainly because, according to research by the Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), there haven’t been any wholesale age restrictions imposed by the platforms. More than half of the 1050 young users polled who had accounts on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram before the ban, still had access four months after the ban came into place. Two thirds said that certain platforms had taken no action at all.
The idea of the Australian ban was, obviously and correctly, to protect children from horrible stuff on social media and to make the platforms accountable for restricting under-16s or face a penalty of around A$49m (£26m) for failing to do so. Many more countries are now following the Aussie suit and considering the same approach, including the UK amongst six other European nations. Around the time of Australia ban UK adults were polled and asked by YouGov should social media be banned and 74% were in favour with 20 % against. However, the MRF have said all along that a ban wouldn’t work and what is required is a fundamental change in how social media platforms are designed.
Banning things tends not to work very well. Anything from booze (Prohibition in the USA in the 1920s), class-A drugs, illegal online content, books like Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, films like A Clockwork Orange, and music like the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen which still reached number 2 in the charts despite no broadcaster playing it. People find a way around bans and still manage to get whatever it is they’re not supposed to have. Kids can be especially cunning online because they’re more tech savvy than the adults who are trying to restrict them!
Fortunately, representatives at the MRF know this and is one of the reasons why it thinks, and has always thought, that an outright ban isn’t the way forward. The Australian stats back this up and the MRF’s response to these stats was…
“Parents and children deserve better than a flawed ban that delivers a false sense of safety that quickly unravels.
“Proponents of a ban argue that it offers an immediate and decisive firebreak, but the early evidence from Australia shows it only lets tech firms off the hook and fails to give children the step change in online safety and wellbeing they need.” (Andy Burrows, Chief Exec of MRF)
In other words, a ban is a knee-jerk reaction and only inadequately addresses a symptom rather than eliminating the cause – the cause, of course being, is that these platforms are deliberately designed to be addictive and keep users online as long as possible. To feed the dopamine hit, techniques that platforms employ are:
Unfortunately, teenagers’ brains are still developing and are susceptible to influence from the outside as they are trying to navigate their place in the world. It’s this age group that is the most vulnerable from the iniquities of social media. And, why there’s a problem.
I wrote an article about the harm social media could be doing to youngsters shortly after Molly Russell’s inquest. That was nearly four years ago in October 2022. In November this year, it will be nine years since Molly Russell died as a result of the damaging content she absorbed online. Nine years! In that time, how many kids have signed up to social media platforms which, to date, are still operating in the same way as they did in 2017 but are even more addictive and damaging? Apart from the Australian ban, nothing has been done and the problem hasn’t been remedied.
The UK government is currently undertaking a public consultation, and the Prime Minister is in line with the MRF in stating that challenging social media platform design is the key to protecting our youngsters online. By challenging the design, social media platforms need to be properly taken to task. Ian Russell, Molly’s dad, welcomes this from Kier Starmer but insists that approach needs to be backed up with a new Online Safety Bill. A £25 million fine, really, is small potatoes to the billions generated by social media companies. It’s kind of worth them doing nothing, making no changes to operations, and just taking the small financial hit.
Public consultations are great, but the YouGov poll has kind of already done that and asked should social media be banned with most in favour. And the public vote in very peculiar ways sometimes. The results of the public consultation may be different, but social media platforms are never ever going to police themselves. It’s baffling to think about how much safeguarding legislation exists already to protect children in general society that has been brought in by successive governments, and literally nothing has been done to combat harmful online content where they spend most of their free time – they can’t go into a boozer after 7pm, even with an adult, but are free to roam the online world unattended. What could possibly go wrong?!
Should social media be banned? Nah! Considering what Ian Russell has been through since 2017, and the incredible work and revealing research that has been done by the Molly Rose Foundation, it doesn’t really take much imagination to figure out to whom the government should be listening to, and taking recommendations and action points from, to successfully protect the nation’s young people online. The MRF kind of know what they’re on about, I should think.
