The UK government plans to make social media companies set a default overnight lockout for users aged 16 and 17, adding another layer to its coming age restrictions for online platforms.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said Tuesday that the proposed rule would block older teenagers from social apps between midnight and 6 am by default. The block would not be compulsory for the user: teenagers could switch it off. That caveat matters, since this is less a hard curfew than a government-mandated default setting with an escape hatch.
The measure is intended to sit alongside a broader ban on social media access for children under 16, which the government expects to bring in during spring 2027. Both policies follow the UK’s Online Safety Act, a contested law that requires services carrying pornography and other material deemed potentially harmful to children to check that users are at least 18.
What platforms would have to change
DSIT said the first full package of social media rules will be placed before Parliament later this year and is due to take effect in 2027. For 16- and 17-year-olds, the department said platforms would also have to turn off certain engagement features by default.
The department named autoplaying video queues and feeds that keep delivering personalized recommendations as targets. Those are not exotic features. They are the basic machinery of modern social apps: ranking systems and playback loops tuned to keep people scrolling. Under the proposal, older teens would be able to override those defaults too.
Technology secretary Liz Kendall said the measures are meant to help young people sleep, concentrate on school and college, and spend more time with family and friends. DSIT framed the older-teen rules as a way to avoid a sudden drop in protections when users age out of the under-16 ban.
That assumes the under-16 ban works well enough to create a generation of teenagers with little or no prior social media use. The government has not yet shown that age-gating at this scale can reliably do that.
AI chatbots are next in the queue
DSIT also said Kendall wants further rules for artificial intelligence services used by minors. The department pointed to mandatory breaks from chatbots for users under 18 and said children are already set to be barred from AI systems that can mimic romantic exchanges.
Regulators would also be asked to address AI services that give dangerous, misleading or unverified mental health advice. DSIT said chatbots judged to pose a serious threat to young people in the UK could be banned.
The government is also seeking changes to school curricula covering AI, technological bias, misinformation and disinformation, plus methods for recognizing violent and misogynistic content.
The enforcement problem is not theoretical
Support for age limits has grown as major platforms face lawsuits and research scrutiny over harms to younger users. The UK government has cited findings that about nine in 10 parents support a legal minimum age for social media access. Pew Research Center reported this month that 56 percent of American adults would support a ban for users under 16.
Civil liberties and digital rights groups have attacked age-gating as a blunt tool. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and GLAAD have argued that broad age checks can restrict access to information and speech, including sex education and LGBTQ resources used by teenagers.
Australia offers the awkward test case. After becoming the first country to ban under-16s from many major social media apps in December, about 5 million accounts were removed within a month, according to reporting cited by Wired. Early research found around 75 percent of 14- and 15-year-olds were getting around the limit. Australian authorities are investigating alleged noncompliance by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, and the government plans to double fines, though it has not collected any so far.
The UK government has said it is using the same model as Australia. That makes the policy fight less about whether ministers can announce a curfew and more about whether platforms can verify ages without building a brittle, privacy-hostile checkpoint for the web.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
