The Prime Minister pledged to stand alongside parents who are concerned about social media
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The Government wants to act in "months, not years" to protect young people from addictive social media, the Prime Minister said today.
As the Government set out new plans to ramp up online safety for children, Sir Keir Starmer said plans could be unveiled before the end of the year.
He said: "You saw in the last government, we had an Online Safety Act, which is good, because it restricts what's available online.
"The trouble is, it took eight years from the original idea to get to an outcome; we can't have eight years when it comes to social media and whether we ban it or [put] massive restrictions in place.
"So, we've taken the powers to make sure we can act within months, not years.“
Australia became the first country in the world to ban under-16s from social media last year.
Spain has announced plans to follow suit, and France, Denmark and Austria have also announced that they are considering their own national age limits.
"We also need to act very quickly, not just of the age concern, but on the devices and applications that make the sort of auto-scrolling, the constant glueing to the machine that you can never stop scrolling," Sir Keir continued.
Sir Keir said they also need to stop the addictive nature of social media and deal with AI bots, like Grok.
He said: "The status quo is not good enough. We need to protect our children, and this Government is making protecting our children a number one priority."
Children could be prevented from using virtual private networks (VPNs) to illicitly access pornography, and they would be limited from speaking with online chatbots under proposals being floated by the Prime Minister to bolster online safety.
Sir Keir also pledged to stand alongside parents who are concerned about social media.
The Prime Minister spoke of his own concerns as a father.
He said: “I have two teenage children, my boy is 17 and my girl is 15.
"So I see this in the way many, many parents do, with a real sense of concern about the time that’s spent on social media, the content that’s available on social media, the addictive nature of a lot of what’s happening on social media, the way it draws children in and takes away other aspects of their growing up.”
Speaking from a community centre in London, he added: “I don’t think there’s a parent in the country who isn’t worried about this, by the way, I really don’t.”
'Technology is changing really quickly, but it took us almost eight years to pass the Online Safety Act.'
@leicesterliz thinks tech legislation should be updated each year to ensure better protection for children. pic.twitter.com/L4ZqUpZCrG— LBC (@LBC) February 16, 2026
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall also said today that a social media ban for children under-16s could be unveiled within months.
She said she wanted to make an announcement on the issue by the summer, and that she wants tech giants to pay fines for breaking British law or face being blocked in the country.
Ms Kendall told LBC's Nick Ferrari at Breakfast: "We're gonna have to start thinking about updating our legislation around technology much more regularly. And this is our determination to do things properly, but move as quickly as we can."
She said that the time it took to pass the Online Safety Act 2023 – which brought in new duties for social media and search firms to identify and prevent the spread of illegal content – was “really frustrating”.