A proposed legislative amendment to attempt to ban under 16s in the UK from common messaging services, sharing family photos, using Wikipedia, and doing much else online, by imposing age assurance on everyone Updated December 18, 2025
Earlier this week, I wrote about a proposed legislative amendment to attempt to compel VPN services providers to prevent anyone under 18 in the UK from using their VPNs.
There’s a second amendment, by the same authors, to prevent under 16s in the UK from, well, doing an awful lot of things online.
For this blogpost, I am working from the running list of amendments from 16 December 2025. The clause in question is on page 25 of that PDF.
Action to promote the wellbeing of children in relation to social media
The aim of this clause is, amongst other things, “introducing regulations to prevent under 16s from accessing social media”.
The term “social media” is an interesting one here, because that it is not what the actual amendment says…
The amendment itself
(1) Within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must, for the purposes of promoting the wellbeing of children— … (b) by regulations made my statutory instrument require all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users.
There are a couple of key points here.
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