Within hours of Keir Starmer announcing a ban on social media for under-16s, searches for VPNs jumped 165% overnight, fuelling demand for digital workarounds before the restrictions even take effect.
The ban, which the government aims to enact by next spring, would prevent under-16s from downloading Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, and from livestreaming themselves. Under-18s would be barred from using romantic chatbots designed to simulate sexual relationships.
“VPN searches surge 165% as UK unveils social media ban for under-16s, sparking backlash from tech giants.”
Starmer announced the measure at a Downing Street press conference, acknowledging he had previously been sceptical about the idea. Allies say that if he is ousted as prime minister in the coming weeks, this will form part of his political legacy.
“Social media is making children unhappy, it’s making it easier for bullies to harass and abuse them, and it could even be harming their mental health,” Starmer said. He argued the ban was not anti-tech: “I do not accept, and I will never accept, that you can’t be both pro tech and AI, and at the same time say we must protect our children.”
The world’s biggest technology companies immediately criticised the ban. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said via a spokesperson: “As we’ve seen in Australia, bans risk isolating teens from online communities and information, and driving them to unregulated alternatives that lack built-in protections and parental controls.”
YouTube said in a statement: “Blanket bans push kids out of such curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less-safe services.” Snapchat added: “Because the majority of time spent on Snapchat is in private messaging between friends and family, an outright ban that disconnects teens from those relationships doesn’t make them safer – it may simply push them to less safe platforms.”
Starmer acknowledged predictions that many teenagers would circumvent the ban, as in Australia, but said that was not the point. “We don’t say: ‘Oh, look, a teenager…’,” he said, trailing off.
Separately, at London Tech Week, the government announced a £1.1bn investment into AI hardware – cutting-edge semiconductor chips on which AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude run. The ambition is to “build globally competitive AI hardware companies in the UK”, but the reality is complex: almost all advanced AI chips are made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), and £1.1bn will not suffice to build a single chip foundry. The strongest component appears to be a £400m procurement opportunity for UK chip makers, though industry experts say a large part of this money was already announced in previous years.
Mark Boost, chief executive of the cloud computing company Civo, said: “It’s genuinely encouraging to see government treating AI compute as national infrastructure and putting real procurement weight behind it.”
As the government pushes forward on two fronts – restricting children’s access to social media while investing in AI infrastructure – the VPN surge suggests many are already looking for ways around the ban, raising questions about how effective the new rules will be.