House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

As public consultation kicks off, members of UK Parliament's second chamber highlight damage to children

UK government is edging closer to following Australia in blocking under-16s from social media accounts after the House of Lords voted in favor of a ban.

On Wednesday evening, the Lords voted 261 to 150 in favor of amending the children's wellbeing and schools bill to require social media services to introduce age checks to block under-16s from access within a year. It will also require the chief medical officers to publish advice for parents on children's use of social media.

Unless members of parliament vote to remove the amendment from the bill when it returns to the House of Commons, it will become law.

The government moved its position on Tuesday when it launched a three-month consultation on keeping children safe online, which will consider banning under-16s from social media and raising the "digital age of consent," when children can give permission for their data to be used without parental consent, from 13 to 16.

"We will look closely at the experience in Australia," technology minister Liz Kendall told the Commons.

According to reports on Thursday, the government may make a further concession to encourage MPs to vote to remove the Lords amendment. This would involve the government amending a bill going through Parliament that would allow it to introduce a social media ban for the under-16s through secondary legislation rather than a new law, a much quicker process.

In a Lords debate before the vote, Conservative life peer Baron John Nash, a former education minister who introduced the amendment, said the last few years had seen massive increases in children's contact with mental health services, eating disorders among 17-19 year olds, disruptive behavior in schools, and sexual exploitation of children and teenagers.

"We face nothing short of a societal catastrophe caused by the fact that so many of our children are addicted to social media," he said.

Liberal Democrat life peer and former children's television presenter Baroness Floella Benjamin, who co-sponsored the amendment, said the government had moved its position in the wrong direction.

"There is no need for a consultation, which will cause even further delay. We have all the evidence we need; we have to stop this catastrophe now," she said.

Baroness Claire Fox, a non-affiliated life peer and director of the Academy of Ideas think-tank, spoke against a ban, noting that Lord Nash was blaming children's access to social media for a wide range of problems:

"At this rate, all that Parliament would have to do is ban the internet for everyone and all problems would be solved," she said. "There is a danger of looking for easy answers and scapegoating social media for all society's ills."

The civil liberties-focused Open Rights Group also argued against a ban, saying it would require widespread use of age-verification across the internet. ®