United Kingdom is the latest country to decide that children under 16 have no business being on social media. On June 15, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer confirmed at a Downing Street press conference that Britain would ban social media access for all children under 16, with legislation expected before the end of the year and the ban itself in place by early 2027. The announcement, reported by the New York Times, covered platforms including TikTok and Instagram, while leaving messaging services like WhatsApp outside the scope of the restrictions.

Britain joined what is rapidly becoming a global movement. Australia was first, enforcing its ban in December 2025. Malaysia and Indonesia followed in the months after. France, Spain, Greece, Canada, Denmark, and more than a dozen other countries are either legislating or actively drafting restrictions.

India has also made some moves. Two southern states have already announced restrictions, while the central government has signalled interest in scaling age-based access limits on social-media platforms for teenagers. However, there is no national policy yet and neither a clear timeline for one.

Social media ban in India

India’s first concrete action on this front came not from New Delhi but from two southern states. On March 6, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka became the first states in the country to announce social media bans for children, though they drew the line at different ages and with different degrees of specificity.

What neither state announced alongside the ban was a plan for how it would actually work. As per an ET Education report, when asked how the restriction would be enforced across homes, schools, and colleges, former Karnataka CM, Siddaramaiah said the government would formulate a programme and announce it once finalised. TechCrunch also noted that the Karnataka government had not consulted technology companies before making the announcement, a detail that leaves the operational side of the ban without a clear shape.

National signals without national policy

At the federal level, the signals have been consistent but stop short of commitment. The central government’s Economic Survey for 2025-26, tabled in Parliament in January, flagged a direct link between high screen time and deteriorating mental health in the 15 to 24 age group, citing anxiety, sleep disorders, and declining attention spans as visible symptoms. The Survey specifically called for age-based access restrictions on online platforms and suggested cutting down on online teaching to reduce digital addiction.

Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw went further in February 2026, telling reporters at the India AI Impact Summit that the government had begun discussions with social media intermediaries on enforcing an age-based ban. “This is something which has now been accepted by many countries that age-based regulation has to be there,” Business Standard quoted him as saying. “It was part of our DPDP Act when we created this age-based differentiation on the content which is accessible to young people.”

That reference to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is significant. The DPDP Act already defines a child as anyone below 18, requires verifiable parental consent before platforms can process a child’s personal data, and prohibits targeted advertising and behavioural tracking of minors. Non-compliance invites penalties of up to Rs 200 crore. However, the DPDP Act is fundamentally a data governance statute. It assumes children will continue to use platforms and seeks to regulate what happens to their data, not whether they can access the platforms at all.

The Supreme Court has also been drawn into the debate. Petitions in cases including Zep Foundation versus Union of India and Child Rights Foundation versus Union of India, both from 2025, sought age-specific restrictions on children’s access to social media. The Court, rather than ordering a ban, deferred the question to the legislature, signalling that any national policy would need to come through Parliament rather than judicial intervention.

What the world is doing

The global direction is less ambiguous. Australia became the first country to enforce a sweeping ban when its Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act came into effect on December 10, 2025, blocking anyone under 16 from holding accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, and Kick. Educational tools like Google Classroom and messaging apps like WhatsApp and YouTube Kids were excluded.

The law places the burden entirely on platforms, not on children or parents. Companies that fail to take “reasonable steps” to prevent underage access face fines of up to A$49.5 million, for serious or repeated breaches, according to a BBC report.

Malaysia joined the enforced category in June 2026, as reported by the Associated Press, requiring all platforms with at least 8 million users to implement age-verification systems and block users under 16 from creating accounts. Companies that fail to comply face penalties of up to 10 million ringgit, or roughly $2.5 million. Indonesia had moved in March 2026, banning children under 16 from what it classified as “high-risk platforms” including TikTok and YouTube.

Canada also introduced digital safety legislation in June 2026, that would bar children under 16 from social media unless platforms could demonstrate sufficient safeguards. As per the Associated Press, the bill also covers AI chatbots and creates a new regulator, the Digital Safety Commission of Canada.

Unlike other countries, Canada’s approach includes a pathway for platforms to earn exemptions by proving safety.

Besides, there have been proposals and announcements regarding social media restrictions across countries like France, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Brazil and more. As TechCrunch noted, the UK announcement brings the total number of countries that have either implemented or are actively legislating these restrictions to well over a dozen.

How enforcement actually works

The architecture of these bans shares a common logic: shift the compliance burden away from families and onto platforms. As the BBC’s report on the Australian model described, governments require what they call “age assurance technologies,” which include facial assessment scans, voice recognition, document-based ID verification, and age inference, a system that analyses a user’s online behaviour and interactions to estimate their age. Australia explicitly prohibits platforms from relying on simple self-certification, where a child can tick a box claiming to be 16.

Platforms in Australia have responded with different approaches. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, began closing accounts it identified as belonging to under-16s from December 4, 2025, and offered users who were mistakenly removed the option to verify their age through government ID or a video selfie. Snapchat offered bank accounts, photo ID, or selfies as verification options.

YouTube denied being a social media platform in order to resist inclusion, and Google reportedly considered a legal challenge before not following through. Snap also denied social media status. These definitional disputes are not trivial: they expose a genuine problem in enforcement, which is that the boundaries of what counts as “social media” are contested and exploitable.

How has this affected social media platforms

The commercial implications for social media companies are substantial, and the numbers tell a layered story. In Australia, the immediate accounting looked dramatic. Within the first month of the ban, regulators announced that platforms had collectively deactivated, removed, or restricted approximately 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children under 16. According to the BBC, Meta alone blocked roughly 550,000 accounts in the first days after the December 10 launch.

But critics question whether even the largest possible fines will function as genuine deterrents. The BBC’s report on the Australian ban quoted former Facebook executive Stephen Scheeler, who told the AAP news agency that “it takes Meta about an hour and 52 minutes to make A$50 million in revenue,” making even the maximum Australian penalty look less like a consequence and more like a rounding error in quarterly earnings. The pressure this creates on regulators to eventually escalate fines or enforcement mechanisms is significant.

The platforms are responding to the regulatory wave with a strategy that looks like managed retreat. Meta has rolled out what it calls Teen Accounts globally, a feature that automatically places users under 16 in restricted content modes with limited advertising, capping personalised ad targeting to only age and location data rather than behavioural profiles.

Meta expanded Teen Account protections to Facebook and Messenger internationally, following their earlier debut in markets including the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. The product is partly a defensive play: by offering a restricted experience, Meta pre-empts the argument that only a full ban can protect young users.

How will it affect social media platforms in India

When India banned TikTok in June 2020 along with 58 other Chinese applications, citing data security concerns, ByteDance reported financial losses of up to $500,000 per day according to a Reuters report citing the company’s Supreme Court filing. The platform was losing close to one million new users per day at the time of the ban, and six million download requests went unfulfilled. At the time of the ban, India represented the largest market for TikTok globally, with the platform having commanded over 600 million downloads in the country. ByteDance eventually shut its India operations down to a skeletal staff and never returned.

India’s top 100 TikTok influencers collectively lost an estimated Rs 120 crore in annual revenue, according to a report by The Indian Institute of Human Brands (IIHB).

A nationwide or even coordinated state-level social media ban for children in India would replicate elements of that dynamic, but at a different scale and with different stakes. India had approximately 900 million internet users at the end of 2025, according to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, and a young, growing population that represents the most valuable long-term advertising market for every major global platform.

Removing or restricting access for the under-16 cohort would not cause the same immediate revenue collapse as the TikTok ban because these are largely not revenue-generating users in any significant direct sense. However, they are the pipeline. They are the users who form brand habits and platform loyalties that carry into adulthood. Losing access to that cohort during formative years carries long-term market implications that the platforms understand very well, which is why their opposition to bans is as vigorous as it is.

Why India is different

Supporters of a ban in India can point to a genuine and worsening problem. The central government’s Economic Survey noted a measurable deterioration in mental health among the 15 to 24 age group tied to high screen time. University vice-chancellors raised the alarm at a February 2026 conclave in Karnataka about digital addiction eroding academic performance and physical fitness.

But India’s circumstances are different enough from Australia’s or the UK’s that a direct policy transplant carries serious risks. The first and most fundamental is what Aparajita Bharti, Founding Partner at The Quantum Hub, described to ET Education as the “shared device” reality. In a very large proportion of Indian households, particularly outside major urban centres, a single smartphone is shared among multiple family members. A ban premised on individual account ownership and device-level age verification assumes a model of digital access that describes a minority of Indian households. Age verification through facial scans or government IDs requires that a child have a device registered to them, an account they own, and a platform that can reliably distinguish their usage from that of the adult whose phone they are borrowing. In rural and semi-urban India, none of these conditions reliably hold.

The educational dimension is equally complicated. As the Bar and Bench analysis of the Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh announcements noted, smartphones and social media in India are not purely recreational tools for many children. For first-generation learners in areas with poor infrastructure, digital access through a smartphone may be the primary or only window to educational content, career information, and basic digital literacy. A blanket ban that removes this access is not equivalent to what a similar ban achieves in countries where alternatives exist in abundance.

Dr. Victoria Nash, senior policy fellow at Oxford’s Internet Institute, made a related point in her comments to CNBC in April 2026: bans risk pushing children toward less regulated parts of the internet, where there are no safety filters at all. The evidence from Australia supports this concern. A BBC report documented how VPN downloads surged in Australia in the days before the ban took effect, as teenagers prepared to route around restrictions.

Teenagers also drew on fake birthdays, older siblings’ accounts, and even drew on their faces to fool facial recognition scans. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper cited by Harvard’s Gazette found that nearly 75 percent of Australian 14 and 15-year-olds were not complying with the ban in its early months, in large part because they perceived so few others were doing so. A broader study found that 61 percent of under-16s reported “no or little change” in their social media use following the ban.

A different path: Safety by design

Sonia Livingstone, a social psychology professor and director of the Digital Futures for Children centre at the London School of Economics, explained to CNBC that there is an alternative framework known as “Safety by Design” that could be applied. This approach shifts responsibility away from users and onto platforms themselves, proposing that social media features be treated more like pharmaceutical products—meaning they would require rigorous premarket testing to prove their safety before being released.

As highlighted in CNBC’s report, Livingstone argues that such standards already exist across most consumer industries, and the lack of similar safeguards for social media represents a fundamental regulatory failure.

Concretely, this would mean legally forbidding specific addictive design elements: infinite scroll, which removes natural stopping points from feeds; “Quick Add” features on Snapchat that algorithmically suggest new contacts for teenagers; streak mechanics that create anxiety about daily engagement; and autoplay sequences that make it effortful to stop watching. Josh Golin, executive director of the non-profit Fairplay, told CNBC he would rather see “privacy and safety by design legislation rather than blanket bans,” including passing legislation to end personal data-driven advertising targeted at children, removing the financial incentive for platforms to engineer addictive experiences for young users.

The road ahead

The global direction is clear. Social media access for children is being restricted by governments at pace. The Australian model is being studied, adapted, and enforced in other regions.

The domestic situation is not so clear. Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have announced bans without enforcement plans, while the central government has signalled intent without a clear timeline.

What India needs, before it announces a policy, is an accounting of its own conditions: the shared device problem, the digital literacy gap, the educational dependency on digital access, and the enforcement vacuum that turned Australia’s landmark legislation into a measure that the majority of affected teenagers ignored.

That is not an argument against protecting children from social media’s demonstrated harms. It is an argument for protecting them effectively, which is a considerably harder thing to do.