UK to ban TikTok and Snapchat for under-16s by 2027

TikTok, Snapchat and other major social platforms will be barred from serving UK users under 16 by spring 2027, putting the United Kingdom at the center of a high-stakes policy experiment that other governments are likely to watch closely. Ministers want the ban to do more than block apps on paper: they are betting that tighter age checks and new limits on risky features will protect children from harms that have already spilled into school life, sleep, and family routines.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said the plan would cover user-to-user platforms built around social interaction and user posts, including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal are not intended to be included. Beyond the blanket age restriction, the government plans wider protections aimed at livestreaming and direct contact from strangers, with those restrictions also set to apply on gaming sites. Ministers said the proposal had backing from nine in 10 parents and would be brought to Parliament before Christmas 2026.

The central question is enforcement. Ofcom has already been pressing the industry to do more, writing on 12 March 2026 to Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube and demanding stronger age checks and child-safety commitments. The regulator said it had investigated nearly 100 services since the online safety laws took effect. That pressure followed new rules that came into force on 25 July 2025, requiring age checks for access to harmful content such as pornography, self-harm, suicide, hate speech and violence. By 24 July 2025, the government said, 1,000 platforms had told Ofcom they had age checks in place.

The policy has been building for months. A government consultation on children’s digital wellbeing ran from 2 March 2026 to 26 May 2026 and drew nearly 30,000 responses from parents and children. Among parent and carer respondents, 89% supported a legal minimum age for social media access, and 96% of those supporters said the floor should be at least 16. The government also ran six-week pilots in 300 teenage homes across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, testing full social media bans, one-hour daily app caps on services such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, and overnight curfews from 9pm to 7am.

For public health advocates, the measure is more than a consumer rule. It is a test of whether a national government can meaningfully slow exposure to addictive design, harmful content and unwanted contact, or whether children will simply move to less visible spaces and more difficult-to-police workarounds.