Growing up is hard. It always has been and it always will be.
Every generation faces its own trials, its own social pressures, its own anxieties, its own cruelties.
That is the nature of adolescence, and no government or piece of legislation will ever change it.
But there is a profound difference between the ordinary struggles of growing up and what we have allowed to happen to this generation of young people.
For the past decade, we have stood back and permitted some of the most powerful and richest corporations the world has ever seen to colonise the minds of our children, and we have called it progress.
The results have been devastating. We have witnessed an epidemic of anxiety, depression and self-harm among teenagers, with girls disproportionately affected.
We have seen algorithms push extremist content that degrades women.
We have watched children spend upwards of nine hours a day doom-scrolling through content specifically engineered to be addictive - content designed not to inform or connect, but to trap.
These are not the usual challenges of adolescence. They are the consequences of our collective failure to hold billion-dollar platforms to account.
This is why I support banning social media for under-16s.
Not reluctantly, and not without reservations, but because the evidence of harm is now so overwhelming that to do nothing would be a dereliction of our duty to the next generation.
Children are not small adults. Their brains are still forming. The frontal cortex - the seat of judgement, impulse control and long-term reasoning - does not fully develop until the mid-20s.
To argue that a 13-year-old should be free to navigate platforms built by armies of psychologists and data scientists is not liberalism; it is abdication.
There are, however, legitimate concerns about the legislation too.
I have serious reservations about how this ban will be enforced, and we must be vigilant that age verification does not become mandatory digital ID smuggled in through the back door.
The privacy implications of the state, or platforms, holding biometric or documentary proof of every citizen’s identity must be debated openly, not decided by bureaucratic default.
We also need to be candid about the risk that, rather than leaving social media altogether, determined teenagers may simply drift into unregulated corners of the internet where they are exposed to far more harmful content.
But, crucially, the existence of imperfect solutions is not an argument for no solution. As Kemi Badenoch has rightly said, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The question is not whether a ban resolves every problem. It is whether it shifts the dial. And I believe it does. Most young people will not use VPNs to circumvent age restrictions.
Most platforms, faced with serious financial penalties rather than the toothless warnings they have grown accustomed to shrugging off, will comply. Friction works.
We know this from seatbelts, from plain cigarette packaging, from minimum alcohol pricing. The absence of a perfect solution has never stopped us from reducing harm.
What an effective opposition must now do is ensure that the implementation of this policy is as rigorous as its ambition.
That means a full debate on age verification and privacy safeguards. It means investment in digital literacy so that when young people do turn 16 and enter these spaces, they are equipped to do so safely.
It means independent review of enforcement within two years.
And it means extending the spirit of this legislation to the AI chatbots and companion apps that are filling the gap - spaces that currently operate with virtually no child safety obligations at all.
The world that children are growing up in today is unrecognisable from the one my own children grew up in, let alone my own generation.
The pace of technological change is accelerating, not slowing, and the challenges of AI will make what we face today look simple.
We will not always have the luxury of perfect answers. But right now, on this specific question, we have the opportunity to draw a line. Children deserve a childhood. They deserve to discover who they are without an algorithm deciding it for them.
This policy, shaped and scrutinised by a strong opposition, can help give that back to them.
This article was published on the 3rd July 2026 in Kent Online, and can be found here: https://kentonline.co.uk/maidstone/news/mega-rich-corporations-are-colo…
