Call for ban on teenagers using social media - July 2025

Terrorism legislation watchdog calls for ban on teenagers using social media, saying Online Safety Act won't work - July 2025

Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has said that he thinks the Online Safety Act will do “precious little” to protect children from harmful content on the internet.

In an interview with LBC, he said that he thought the only effective measure to address this problem would be an Australian-style ban on under-16s accessing social media.

Asked what the Online Safety Act would achieve, he replied:

Precious little. And the reason is that it’s not actually about removing particular content. It’s about creating systems, and those systems have got to be, in the jargon, proportionate, and that depends upon what the tech companies are willing to do, frankly.

And then Ofcom, who are the government’s regulator, who’ve got to enforce this, my word, they have got a massive pallet of threats to deal with. They’ve got to deal with child sex abuse, suicide videos, self-harm. By the time they get to just straightforward gory violence and terrorism material or knives, it’s going to be some way down the line. So I think you have to be realistic about this.

If you want my honest answer, and I’ve looked at this topic for a long time now, I think that children have got to stop using social media, full stop.

And I think we need to go down the line that Australia has pioneered. In my dreams, we would just have kids with dumb phones and a few apps, and that would be distributed on the NHS. And if the government was really bold, they would grasp this bull by the horns.

But I’m afraid the Online Safety Act is not going to be the solution.