The UK just got much closer to banning under-16s from social media. So, how long could it take for a ban to come into force?
On Thursday night, the House of Lords voted for a social media ban for under-16s added into a piece of legislation called the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The amendment could drastically speed up the implementation of a social media ban here in the UK. If it is also passed by the House of Commons it will become law.
Read more: What UK social media ban on children could look like – as government considers action
Without amendment, campaigners would have had to wait for the government to run a nationwide consultation that it announced on Monday.
Ministers are not scheduled to respond to that consultation until the summer, so that would already have meant a six-month wait.
If the consultation did suggest a ban was necessary, the government would then have had to give MPs a chance to vote on it and pass new legislation. More time would then have been needed to give tech companies time to prepare.
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By adding an amendment into legislation already going through parliament, Lord Nash, who proposed the amendment, has managed to skip many of those hurdles. That was intentional.
“The longer we delay, the more children we fail,” the Conservative peer said earlier this week.
Read more: Logging off: Kids’ social media ban now feels almost certain
Now the bill – with its new social media ban amendment – will go back to the House of Commons for MPs to consider and vote on it.
One Labour MP told Sky’s political reporter Faye Brown there was “no way” the government could pressure its MPs to vote against it, claiming a majority are in favour of the ban.
The government in Australia faced very similar pressure in the run-up to approving their ban for under-16s on social media, according to Daniel Stone, a fellow with Australia’s Centre for Responsible Technology who is currently based in Cambridge.
“From far away, we can think that the Australian government went into this with a really clear intention,” he told Sky News, “But the reality is that the process wasn’t that dissimilar from what we’re seeing playing out here.
“The Australian government had originally resisted acting on it, and then, due to the political circumstance, it became more and more urgent, and they decided that there was an incredible amount of political urgency, and that the community really wanted to see something done, and decided to embrace it.”
As in Australia, once the law passes, tech companies will be given 12 months to prepare to remove their under-16 users and block new ones.
Many of them will already have the technology in place to do this. In July, new rules came into force that meant under-18s needed to be blocked from seeing adult and harmful content.
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The age-verification tools used by many UK companies to comply with those rules is the same tech being used in Australia to block under-16s from social media.
There’s been a fair amount of criticism of that technology, with Australian teenagers this week telling Sky News they were able to easily bypass it. However, that doesn’t necessarily undermine the ban, according to Mr Stone.
“Some kids might attempt to get around this and they’ll probably be successful if they do,” he said.
“The important thing is to make sure that we’re establishing a clear social norm, that [social media] is harmful, that a certain amount of care is required and that we should be broadly hesitant about jumping straight into it.”
