23 June 2026
Written by Emma Murray, Policy and Public Affairs Officer at the Children’s Law Centre
Reframing the Debate
Public debate about children and the digital world constantly swings between two poles: protection and participation. But from a children’s rights perspective, both are equally important, and policymaking must move beyond this unhelpful binary.
The UK Government’s recent consultation on growing up in the online world recognised both elements of this, acknowledging the risks children face as well as the benefits they gain from digital participation. Yet the announcement of a social media ban for under-16s is a much less nuanced approach.
While it is right to recognise the harm children face, if the problem lies with social media platforms, then the solution must be to make those environments safe, not to exclude young people from them. Resorting to reductive, blanket restrictions in isolation is a hallmark of fearful, reactionary policymaking.
Over the past six months, I have worked with our youth advisory panel, Youth@CLC, on issues relating to their digital rights. Their message is clear: young people’s online lives are complex, interconnected and deeply embedded in their social worlds. Any policy response that flattens this undermines positive efforts to ensure both participation and protection.
The current debate is stuck in an unhelpful binary. A rights-based, young people centred approach is essential for countering this and enacting meaningful change.
Challenging the Binary Approach
Proponents of bans insist that shielding children form harmful content is the only responsible path. Opponents counter that bans undermine children’s rights to information, expression, connection and play.
The central question that runs through this debate is whether we should protect children online or empower them to freely explore the world around them. But this binary is false.
Children and young people should be able to access digital spaces and be safe while doing so. In fact, regardless of age, we all deserve online spaces free from violence, harassment, and unwanted content. Addressing harms requires an approach to digital environments that upholds safety and dignity while enabling full, meaningful participation. Protection and participation are not competing priorities, and policies that treat them as such miss the point entirely.
Political Expediency, Moral Panic and the Rush to Regulate
To understand why restrictive and blanket measures are gaining traction, we must consider the wider political and cultural context. Currently, policymaking around children’s technology use is being shaped by political expediency, media driven moral panic and a desire for quick, visible action.
While governments are right to respond to online harms, the speed at which bans are being proposed risks oversimplifying a highly complex issue. In focusing primarily on restricting access to digital spaces, these approaches fail to adequately grapple with the full range of issues shaping children and young people’s online experiences, including the wider social, economic and structural factors that influence wellbeing.
Policymakers are over relying on child protection narratives, echoing historical patterns like book bans, abstinence-based sex education, or anti-LGBTQIA+ policies. These approaches have always been rooted in fear rather than evidence and desperately need to be counteracted.
Experts working at the intersection of technology and children’s rights have identified that the current discourse surrounding children’s technology use has been significantly influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, which argues that smartphones have created a mental health crisis in children and young people as they ‘rewire’ children’s brains.
However, as has been widely pointed out by those in the field of adolescent psychology, Haidt is not an expert on child development or online harms, and his claims have been widely challenged for sensationalism and reactionary undertones. Research consistently shows that structural issues such as poverty, inequality and access to services, have a far greater impact on wellbeing than technology alone.
This is not to suggest that use of digital technologies and social media are not having an impact on young people’s wellbeing. Rather, policy responses are relying on an overwhelmingly negative and one-dimensional picture of young people’s online lives.
However, research from Dynamic Interplay of Online Risk and Resilience in Adolescence (DIORA) found that being online is seen as having just as many, if not more, positive effects than negative by young people. Yet restrictive policies continue to emerge, often without sufficient consideration of proportionality, evidence, or unintended consequences for children’s rights.
The pattern is similar across the world. Academics at the University of Sydney found that support for Australia’s social media ban was heavily influenced by sustained media coverage, high profile publications such as Haidt’s book and parent led advocacy campaigns that called for a ban.
Researchers concluded that the media’s behaviour met the criteria for a moral panic, reinforcing narrow constructions of childhood and creating a supportive environment for age-based restrictions. This constrained alternative policy approaches that could have better accounted for the diversity of young people’s experiences and maturity, and offer ways to create safer online environments for everyone.
Meanwhile, political focus on online safety is increasingly divorced from young people’s wider lived realities, which risks distracting from the broader policy failures that significantly impact children’s wellbeing. Persistent cuts to education, mental health services, youth provision and social care continue to shape young people’s experiences and opportunities, yet these issues are receiving far less political attention than calls for social media bans.
Why a Rights Based Approach Matters
A children’s rights-based approach offers a more comprehensive way to assess the impact, effectiveness and appropriateness of social media bans. It requires policymakers to consider the full range of children’s rights and recognise that no right exists in isolation or is inherently more important than another. This will help move discussions beyond moral panics and politically expedient responses towards more evidence based, proportionate, effective, and nuanced policymaking.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) sets out a wide range of rights that apply equally online and offline, including: non-discrimination, freedom of expression, privacy, access to information, protection from violence, education and play, leisure and culture.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No.25 on children’s rights in the digital environment reinforces this. States who have ratified the Convention – as the UK did in 1991 – must protect children from harm without imposing overly restrictive measures that limit participation, expression, or access to information.
Instead, governments should focus on creating safer digital environments, improving digital literacy, ensuring platform accountability, and addressing structural inequalities that shape children’s experiences online. Critically, General Comment No.25 states the importance of involving children and young people in the development of legislation, policies, programmes, services and training in relation to the digital environment.
A rights-based lens makes clear that “ban-solutionism” (the assumption that restricting or banning access will resolve online harms) is not the answer. It oversimplifies the problem, drives harmful behaviour further underground and away from support, and heightens the risk of violating children’s rights.
Designing Solutions with Children and Young People
The most important – and most overlooked – element of effective digital policy is listening to children and young people. Child rights and digital rights experts have repeatedly stated that the best approach to addressing the crises that young people face is to simply ask them. Children are not passive or disempowered; they know what works, what doesn’t and what needs to change.
Article 12 of the UNCRC states that children have the right to share their views and have those views given due weight in all matters affecting them. This is a cornerstone of the UNCRC and applies to all aspects of policy and all levels of decision making.
Across all my conversations with Youth@CLC on their digital rights, they have repeatedly highlighted how adults dismiss their views. As one member put it:
“There’s a lot of hypocrisy on this. Young people have a better awareness of how much social media and online activity plays a role in real world activities. We understand the benefits and opportunities, and how much online stuff facilitates our real lives. It’s so interchangeable at this stage and is such a big part of our lives. We need to learn to live with it and use it responsibly. And young people already do use it responsibly, and have the skills to do so, much more so than adults do. They just need to actually listen to us.”
Too often, even when adults acknowledge children’s views about the online world, it’s followed by doubt about whether young people really know what’s best for them. Yet young people are skilled navigators of digital spaces, often far more fluent than the adults making decisions on their behalf. Their lived experience means they are uniquely placed to judge whether proposed changes to technology policy are useful and workable.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Although the decision on a social media ban for under 16s has already been announced in the UK (we’re yet to see if it survives a change in Prime Minister), debates about children’s online lives will continue. We can continue down the path of fear driven, restrictive policymaking, or we can choose a rights-based, evidence informed, young person-centred approach that recognises the complexity and diversity of children’s digital lives.
Young people deserve policies that reflect their lived realities, respect their rights and support their ability to participate safely and meaningfully in digital spaces. Protecting young people and upholding their digital rights are not competing aims; effective policy must do both. That means resisting moral panics, challenging simplistic narratives, developing evidence-based responses that address root causes of harm, and, above all, listening to children and young people.
For a more in-depth exploration of young people’s experiences of the digital environment, read the write up of Youth@CLC’s participation in the UN’s “Our Digital World, Our Say” consultation. You can also read their policy recommendations in their response to the UK Government’s consultation on ‘Growing Up in the Online World’.
