A blanket social media ban will fail the boys it claims to protect
On 2 June, the Mayor of London argued in an LBC opinion piece that a social media ban is "the only way" to protect boys from the manosphere. It is a striking claim, made a week after the government's consultation on children's social media usage closed on 26 May 2026, and it deserves a serious response.
Khan is right about the problem, and the scale of it is worth stating plainly. Hope not Hate's polling found that 80% of 16- and 17-year-old British boys had consumed content created by Andrew Tate, a man more familiar to that age group than the Prime Minister, whom only 60% could name. Tate and his imitators have built an industrial pipeline that funnels boys from fitness clips into misogyny, and the damage is showing up in classrooms: a University of York study found 90% of secondary teachers and 68% of primary teachers want dedicated teaching material to address online misogyny. But the prescription, a blunt under-16s ban modelled on Australia's, would not protect those boys. It would push them somewhere worse.
Consider the evidence from Canberra. Australia's ban took effect on 10 December 2025, and by early this year the eSafety Commissioner reported that around five million accounts held by under-16s had been deactivated. However, this promising statistic conceals a different story: the regulator’s first compliance report suggests many children have retained their accounts, opened new ones, or found ways to bypass mandatory age-assurance checks. Most damningly, key indicators of harm remained unchanged. The law did not remove children from social media, and it did not move the dial on harm.
That gap between policy and behaviour matters because the alternative to Instagram is not the local park. The BBC found that in the days after Australia's law came into force, downloads of Discord and other apps not covered by the ban surged, with VPN downloads spiking in the run-up. And here is the detail that should give any UK minister pause: Australia's ban explicitly excludes Discord, Roblox and YouTube Kids. The danger on the other side is not theoretical. Ofcom is currently investigating Telegram over child sexual abuse material flagged by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, and X over its Grok chatbot being used to generate sexual images of children. These are the rooms a ban ushers children towards, and the manosphere is not a recommendation algorithm's accident there. It is the furniture.
This is precisely the trap the National Crime Agency and the National Police Chiefs' Council warned against this spring. Regulation, they argue, should follow the risk rather than the platform, closing the loophole that displaces harm from one app to the next. A platform-by-platform ban does the opposite: it hands harm a new address.
There is a third problem, less discussed but just as serious. Online safety, like road safety, is a skill. You do not teach a child to cross the road by keeping them off pavements until they turn 16, then handing them the keys to a car. Yet that is the logic of a hard ban. A teenager reaches 16 with full access and no resilience, at exactly the age when peer pressure and identity formation are at their most intense.
The strongest case for a ban, and it should be acknowledged, is that the platforms have had more than a decade to fix this themselves and have not. Self-regulation has failed. From that vantage point a ban is not a perfect policy; it is the only lever a frustrated state has left to pull. That argument has weight. But it rests on a false premise: that the state has run out of levers. It has not. It has a powerful one, already built, that it has barely begun to pull.
The duty Khan says we need already exists. Under Ofcom's Children's Codes, in force since July 2025, any platform whose recommender system poses a medium or high risk must configure its algorithms to filter harmful content out of children's feeds. The protected categories expressly include misogynistic, hateful and violent material. Ofcom describes recommender systems as children's main pathway to harm, runs a dedicated monitoring programme aimed at the largest platforms, has already opened dozens of investigations across the regime, and can fine companies up to 10% of global turnover. The real question is not what new law to pass. It is whether ministers will back the regulator to use the law it has aggressively, or reach for the simpler headline of a ban.
A smarter approach would do three things. First, it would enforce and sharpen the recommender duties already on the books, treating an under-16 feed that funnels boys towards misogyny as the breach it is, rather than waiting for self-reporting. Second, it would fund digital literacy in schools at the scale we fund PSHE, treating online safety as a skill to be built rather than a risk to be hidden from. Third, it would resource the NCA and Ofcom to map where children migrate when mainstream platforms tighten, and to follow the risk into those spaces, because that migration is the predictable consequence of any restriction worth having and we now know, from Canberra, that it happens within days.
None of this is as satisfying as a ban. It does not fit on a placard. But it engages with how teenagers actually behave, rather than how we would like them to behave, and it does not hand the manosphere a recruitment gift by exiling its target audience to the parts of the internet where it already runs unchallenged.
Khan has done the debate a service by naming the threat. The government should now resist the temptation to match his answer with one of its own, and instead use the consultation response to set out a regime that regulates the platforms hard, teaches children well, and follows the traffic when it moves. Protecting boys from the manosphere is the right goal. A ban is the wrong tool.
Alice West is a writer for Comment Central.
