Older teenagers in Britain will have to switch the settings on social media apps to be able to use them after midnight under new safeguarding rules planned by the government. The state is reaching straight into the phone, then into the night, then into the habits of 16- and 17-year-olds, with a default overnight curfew that would block access between midnight and 6 a.m. unless users change the setting themselves.
The government said on Tuesday that features designed to keep users scrolling would also be switched off by default. That means the machinery built to hold attention, harvest time and keep people inside the feed gets a new legal wrapper, while ministers present it as protection. The same apparatus that lets tech companies profit from endless engagement now gets a government-issued off switch for minors, at least on paper.
The State Reaches Into the Feed
Technology minister Liz Kendall said, “These measures will be crucial in helping young people get the sleep they need, focus on school and college, and spend more quality time with family and friends.” Online safety minister Kanishka Narayan went further and made the coercion explicit. “We’re forcing the tech companies to do it,” he told LBC Radio on Wednesday. He said the companies had a liability to do more robust age checks and that those that fail to do so would face “very severe regulatory sanction”.
That’s the language of the modern state in miniature: not persuasion, but compulsion; not public control over technology, but a command sent through corporate compliance departments. The government says the companies must implement the curfew, and the companies, for now, have not said a word. Instagram owner Meta, TikTok parent ByteDance and Google, which owns YouTube, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on the curbs.
The opposition Conservative Party education policy chief Laura Trott called the plans “a mess.” “Either they think 16- and 17-year-olds should be on social media or they don’t, but curfews they can simply switch off won’t achieve anything,” she said. The argument is familiar. One side promises protection through enforcement, the other says the enforcement won’t work. Neither question the right of the state to decide when young people may use a platform, or how much of their night belongs to a minister’s timetable.
Brussels-Style Logic, London Edition
The first set of regulations on social media restrictions will be laid before parliament by the end of this year, with measures expected to come into force in spring 2027, the government said. The machinery moves slowly, but it moves. Parliament gets the paperwork. Tech firms get the order. Teenagers get the curfew.
The move came a month after the government announced plans to introduce a sweeping ban on social media for young people under 16. The new curfew sits beside that broader crackdown, extending the same logic to older teenagers. The state draws the line, then redraws it, then calls the result safeguarding. It’s a familiar rhythm: more rules, more checks, more sanctions, all in the name of care.
The government framed the curbs as part of global concerns among parents and policymakers about safeguarding young people from the harmful effects of social media on their mental and physical health. That concern may be real. The method is the old one. Control the platform, regulate the user, and leave the profit structure intact.
Who Gets to Decide
A team that advised Australia, the first country to ban social media for children, found that online platforms were stumbling at the very first step of implementing age-verification checks, rendering the ban ineffective. That detail matters because it shows how quickly these grand regulatory gestures run into the practical limits of platform design and enforcement. The state announces a boundary. The companies build around it. The user gets caught in the middle.
Google and TikTok have in the last month separately settled a U.S. lawsuit brought by a minor who claimed that social media platforms damaged his mental health. That settlement sits in the background like a warning label on the whole affair: the platforms are already under pressure over the damage they do, while governments respond with more surveillance, more age checks and more legal force.
The first regulations will be laid before parliament by the end of this year. The measures are expected to come into force in spring 2027. Until then, the debate will keep circling the same dead centre: whether the state can manage the harms of corporate platforms without ever touching the corporate logic that produces them. The answer, so far, is more curfew, more compliance, more control.