What the under-16 social media ban means for your business

Social media is back in the headlines this week following Prime Minister Keir Starmer's announcement of an 'Australia plus' ban on certain platforms for under-16s.

The debate around whether it will work, goes far enough or if it's even enforceable, will run for months.

But this blog isn't about that debate. It's not about child safety, parenting, Government overreach or the politics of big tech. It's about how this announcement could impact how you promote your business.

Because regardless of whether your customers include the under-16s or not, this policy will certainly affect your digital marketing, and some of its impacts will show up sooner than you might expect.

What's been announced?

Australia became the first country to ban under-16s from social media when its legislation came into force in December 2025. The UK is now following suit, but going further.

The Government's plan uses the same basic model as Australia's, targeting user-to-user platforms whose primary purpose is social interaction and the sharing of content.

In practice, that means Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and X will all be prohibited from offering their services to under-16s.

But the 'plus' in 'Australian plus' is significant. Beyond the platform ban, the Government is introducing restrictions on harmful features, including livestreaming and communication with children, that will apply to a wider range of services, including Kick, Twitch and Threads. These restrictions will apply by default to 16 and 17-year-olds, to avoid a hard cut-off at 16. The Government is also looking at introducing overnight curfews and breaks in 'infinite scrolling' for under-18s, with more detail expected in July.

AI 'romantic companion' chatbots, which are designed to simulate intimate relationships or roleplay, will face a minimum age of 18. And similar features on AI chatbots more broadly will be restricted for under-18s.

The legislation to give ministers the power to act is already in place, having passed as part of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act. The first regulations are expected to come into force in Spring 2027.

What does it mean for your business?

When the platforms begin removing under-16 accounts at scale, as they'll be required to do, your reach, impressions, followers and engagement could all fall.

It won't be because of the quality of your content or the performance of your campaigns. Rather, it will be the direct consequence of a significant portion of each platform's user base being removed. When Australia introduced its ban late last year, 4.7 million accounts were taken down. The UK has roughly 13 million under-16s, so the numbers here will be larger.

So, if you use social media analytics to report on performance to stakeholders or to justify your marketing spend, you need to get ahead of this now. Pull your current benchmarks and document them. That way, when your figures dip, which they likely will, you'll be able to show that the drop is contextual, not a sign that something's gone wrong.

However, removing users' accounts is the visible part. The less visible, but arguably more significant, change is what might happen to the algorithms.

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have built their recommendation engines around engagement signals that, by design, favour content that keeps people scrolling. A meaningful portion of that engagement has historically come from younger users, who tend to spend more time on-platform and interact more frequently. Strip that out, and the platforms will recalibrate. They won't have a choice. Their advertisers demand reach, and reach requires a functioning algorithm.

What that recalibration might look like in practice is difficult to predict because the platforms won't announce it. But history is a reasonable guide. Every major regulatory or structural shift in social media has triggered algorithm changes that rippled beyond those directly affected. Content that performed well before those changes often didn't afterwards.

So, if your organic social strategy is working well right now, don't assume it will keep working in the same way once this legislation beds in. Monitor your data closely over the next six to 12 months and be prepared to adapt.

Review your paid ads

For most B2B businesses, the impact on paid social advertising will be manageable. The ban targets consumer-facing platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, so the under-16 demographic is unlikely to be a core audience segment for businesses selling professional services, IT support or manufacturing solutions.

That said, the legislation will introduce age verification requirements to tighten how the platforms handle targeting. Ad approval processes may also become more stringent on the affected platforms, so you may need to adjust your audience parameters.

So, it's worth sitting down with whoever manages your paid campaigns and running a review, just to be sure your setup is clean before the rules change.

The businesses most at risk here are those running broad awareness campaigns where the targeting isn't as tightly defined. If your ads have been reaching a wide audience and relying on the platform to optimise them, now's a good time to tighten that up, regardless of this legislation.

Age verification

To enforce this ban, platforms will likely need to verify the age of every user, including new sign-ups and existing account holders. That means every adult currently using these platforms may, at some point, be required to prove they're over 16 to continue accessing them.

The infrastructure for doing this is already shaky. The age verification ecosystem in the UK has no register of approved providers.

A meaningful number of adults will encounter the verification process, find it intrusive or inconvenient, and not complete it. They won't delete their accounts. They'll just stop logging in, and the audiences on the affected platforms will quietly dwindle.

There are also questions about how the ban will be enforced in the UK. Despite Australia's ban being in place since December last year, research suggests around 61% of under-16s there still have access to social media.

So, the picture your data paints won't be as clear once the ban comes in. The platforms' reported audience figures will shrink, and it will be harder to understand who's actually seeing your digital content.

What might happen with LinkedIn?

While every other major platform is bracing for regulatory pressure when the ban comes into force, LinkedIn will sit largely outside it. It isn't covered by the proposed framework. Its mechanics are built around building business relationships, not engagement-bait and infinite scrolling, so it doesn't have the same problems to solve.

So, if you or your business has put LinkedIn on the back burner because it feels like extra effort, it's worth revisiting now.

While the affected platforms face an uncertain few months of structural change, LinkedIn's audience should remain stable. Its targeting for B2B audiences is strong, and its organic reach, relative to its size, is still better than most.

You've never owned your social media audience

If Instagram, Facebook or TikTok went away tomorrow, or changed their algorithms so dramatically that your content stopped performing, what would you have left?

If the answer is 'not much', that's where your real work begins.

The under-16 ban is the latest in a long line of reminders that social media platforms are rented ground. You don't own your followers. You don't own your reach. You don't own the algorithms that decide whether your content gets seen. Every one of those things belongs to the platforms, and the platforms can change their terms at any point.

This isn't a new argument. Businesses have been learning this lesson in waves since Facebook began throttling organic brand reach back in 2014. The iOS privacy changes hit paid social advertisers hard in 2021. And TikTok has faced repeated questions about its long-term viability in the West. Each of these events caused real disruption for businesses that focused all their marketing efforts on those platforms. So, now's a good time to look at what you own and how you use it.

Your website is yours. It won't change its algorithm or remove your audience. A well-built, well-maintained website that's optimised for search, loads quickly and converts visitors into enquiries will keep working regardless of what any Government or social media platform decides to do.

Your email list is yours, too. Every subscriber on it has given you permission to contact them. No platform sits between you and that relationship, so no algorithm decides which of them sees your latest message. Email consistently outperforms social media on conversion across almost every sector. And, unlike social, the rules around it haven't fundamentally changed in years.

The key takeaway here is to focus on building your marketing foundations on the channels you control, and use social media only for what it's good at – awareness and amplification – rather than treating it as the centre of everything.

How can QBD help?

When the social media ban for under-16s passes into law, some of the impacts we've outlined here will play out as expected. Others will surprise everyone. That's the nature of legislation this significant. The unintended consequences are always as interesting as the intended ones.

But the underlying point will hold regardless of how the detail shakes out.

Social media has never been a stable foundation for a marketing strategy. It's always been a borrowed audience on someone else's platform, subject to rules you didn't write and can't control. This new policy will make that reality harder to ignore. So, if you want your business to come out of the next 12 months in the strongest position, now's the time to start investing in what you own.

That means building a website that earns its place in search, an email list that grows with purpose, and a content strategy that doesn't depend on any single platform staying the same. If managing all of that alongside running your business feels like a stretch, we can help.

QBD Pulse is our structured ongoing digital marketing programme, built with your audience and objectives in mind. It brings together your content and SEO, social media, email marketing and reporting into a single, strategic marketing plan that ensures your digital channels are working consistently without you having to run them yourself.

If you'd like to talk through what that might look like for your business, get in touch to book a FREE, no-obligation consultation.