Britain keeps regulating teenagers when the problem is the platforms

Three announcements in the space of a month tell you most of what you need to know about British online safety policy.

First, under-16s are to be banned entirely from a range of platforms. Then 16 and 17-year-olds are to have social media switched off by default between midnight and six — a setting they can change themselves. Then Ofcom opens an investigation into whether TikTok's age checks work at all, having already said publicly that it has "very serious questions about whether age inference can be highly effective".

Read together, the sequence is odd. The government is rolling out rules that depend on knowing how old users are, while the regulator openly doubts that the industry can reliably determine that. The enforcement is arriving ahead of the mechanism.

The curfew is the clearest illustration of the underlying instinct. Ellen Roome, whose 14-year-old son Jools Sweeney died in 2022 in what she believes was an online challenge, described it as offering a 17-year-old a bottle of alcohol and moving it slightly out of arm's reach. The comparison is unkind and accurate. A default that the affected user can switch off is not a restriction; it is a nudge with a press release attached.

Baroness Kidron has put the alternative framing more precisely than any minister has managed. The aim, she argues, should not be "banning children from tech" but "banning tech from putting toxic products in the hands of children". Those are not two versions of the same policy. The first regulates the child, who has no lobbyists. The second regulates the product, which has many.

The distinction stopped being abstract this month. Ofcom announced it could take no further legal action against a pro-suicide forum that campaigners link to more than 130 UK deaths — the first service it investigated under the Online Safety Act. The site geoblocked British users, which the regulator accepts still leaves it reachable through a VPN, and Ofcom says it has now exhausted its legal routes. Andy Burrows of the Molly Rose Foundation said the decision would "result in more lost lives".

That is the test case, and the law failed it. Not because the regulator lacked will — its enforcement director says the powers were used "to the fullest extent possible" — but because the powers stop short of what the situation requires. Ofcom is now working with the government on whether it should be able to obtain court orders compelling internet providers to block a site. It should have had that power before it needed it.

None of this makes the teenage-facing measures worthless. Auto-play and infinite scroll being off by default is a real design change, and shifting the defaults does shift behaviour at the margins. Ofcom's action against non-compliant adult sites has produced fines and results.

But there is a reason ministers reach first for rules aimed at young people. Those rules are announceable, cheap, and generate no organised opposition. Requirements that bite on platform design — on recommendation systems, on engagement mechanics, on the economics of keeping a 16-year-old scrolling at 1am — cost companies money and are fought accordingly. Meta's position that age verification is really a job for device manufacturers is a small, honest example of the reflex.

Liz Kendall says the measures will help young people "get the sleep they need, focus on school and college, and spend more quality time with family and friends". Nobody disputes the goal. The question is who carries the burden of achieving it. So far the answer is teenagers, their parents, and a regulator that has just told bereaved families it has run out of law.