The UK wants under-16s off social media. Every engineer in the thread asks the same thing: how

A ban almost nobody in the thread argues against on the merits

The headline is a proposed UK rule pushing social media to a minimum age of 16. What's striking in the 260-comment thread is how little of it disputes that kids and these apps are a bad mix. The fight is entirely about implementation.

The legal scaffolding already exists. Britain's Online Safety Act is in force, and Ofcom can already investigate and fine platforms that fail to keep children off age-gated content. The new push, tied to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and a consultation that ran spring 2026, would harden a soft 13 into a checked 16. Australia is the live template: its under-16 ban switched on in December 2025, which is why the comparison runs through the thread. (UK proposal background.)

The evidence is thinner than the policy implies

One researcher in the thread, who linked the geographic 'natural experiment' work, was careful about the science rather than the politics:

"The evidence of social media causing depression and anxiety in youth is mixed and almost all of the affirmative findings are correlational… the strongest positive evidence I've seen comes from the natural experiments tracking when high speed internet & phones were introduced geographically" — a commenter who linked the After Babel data

That asterisk matters because the policy is being sold on settled harm, while the cleanest signal comes from before/after timing of when phones arrived, not from controlled studies.

Where the verification data actually goes

The sharpest objection wasn't anti-kid, it was about plumbing. An engineer with a decade in multiplayer games drew the line precisely:

"My problem is that this info doesn't go to the government… it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are" — a software engineer who works on multiplayer games

His proposed alternative was to mandate parental controls on the device, where the check stays local, and several voices echoed it. The privacy cost of age-gating is that to prove one child is under 16, the adult internet has to prove it is over 16, every time.

There's also a scoping question the reporting left vague. A Cloudflare engineer asked whether the ban even applies uniformly:

"A lot of reporting seems to state that it's only for 'high risk social media'. Is that the case? Are they really picking and choosing which social media they will ban for under 16s?" — a Cloudflare Workers engineer, ex-Meta

The enforcement skeptics pointed at precedent: vaping is already illegal to sell to UK minors, and youth use only plateaued rather than collapsed. A flat ban doesn't make a determined 15-year-old vanish; it pushes them to registration-free platforms.

The trade nobody gets to opt out of

The honest read in the thread isn't 'this is good' or 'this is surveillance', because both camps shouted those. It's the one a commenter stated plainly: he's fine with banning social media for under-16s, and completely against it meaning strong identification of everyone over 16. You can't have the first without building the second. That's the actual decision on the table, and the consultation response due in summer 2026 is where it gets made.