Like many of my colleagues in Trust & Safety, I've spent the weeks since the UK announced its under-16 social media ban reading a million-and-one opinions about it. Most of them are written by people who've never had to actually enforce anything. So my CEO, Guillaume Bouchard, and I decided to do something different. We sat down, turned on the camera, and debated it properly.
Guillaume - a father of three teenagers - took a stance that supports the ban. While I took the side of the practitioner who thinks overarching bans don't survive contact with enforcement. We didn't script it and we didn't reach an agreement either. Below is an edited version of where the discussion actually went.
The quotes are lightly cleaned up from the transcript for readability, nothing more.
Round one: why ban at all
Deniz: Just to set the stage, I looked at the different types of bans that we enforce in society today. So the first types of bans are related to safety and the physical environment: we know that enforcing seat belts protects people from being hurt in car accidents. We have laws against people killing each other. We have laws against drunk driving. There are policies eliminating lead paint and asbestos in construction.
But on the other hand, when you have “high demand” behaviors or “vices” that are more appealing such as drugs, that doesn't really eliminate consumption. It usually just pushes that behavior underground and makes it more harmful than if it was regulated by the government or by a licensing body.
Then there's the tricky middle ground that we're discussing today, the social media ban. Do you think that this fits in one category or the other? And what's your general stance on the UK's announcement? And you have three teenagers. So what has been your observation with your teenagers' use of social media?
Guillaume: If you're a parent, you just see that it's too much and you can't control it. And it's so impactful for the rest of your life, because you can't undo the way you grew up. My own children spent far too much time on social media, especially during COVID. I'm proud of them, but I call them the lost generation. That's the truth.
Deniz: I understand the instinct. But if you'd stopped your children having phones entirely, you'd have pushed them out of their peer groups. That's a real cost too.
Guillaume: Which is exactly why it has to be a wider ban. If you only ban it in one school, you divide the school, because children always want to be like their friends. If you leave it up to the parents, their approach might change based on their situation. It's very unfair because it makes you so dependent on the quality of your parents. A ban changes the norm. It makes it socially acceptable not to be on social media.
Deniz: Here's what worries me operationally. No detection is 100% accurate. I’ve seen this over and over again at Meta, Trustpilot, Tiktok. You can optimize to a degree but you have to always balance precision vs. recall. And sometimes, even the best-written policies can fail at the enforcement stage. What I’m worried about is if a platform declares itself minor-free, will that give it a get-out-of-jail-free card to relax its grooming detection? Technically there are no minors on the platform anymore, so why keep investing in protecting them? You can end up making the environment more dangerous for the minors who do slip through.
Guillaume: That's a risk you manage, not a reason to do nothing.
Round two: the alcohol analogy
This is the point where it got a little spicy.
Guillaume: Alcohol is forbidden for children. Do you disagree with that? Should we let six-year-olds drink because their parents allow it? Because that's what you're saying.
Deniz: No, and you're fighting dirty here. It's not the same thing, and you know it. Can you honestly tell me that your children did not have one taste of alcohol before they were 18? Enforcement changes everything. We can check an ID at a bar. We cannot reliably tell how old someone is behind a screen.
Guillaume: Of course they did, but my point is that age limits work even when imperfect: they shift norms, give parents a reference point, reduce peer pressure, and help young people understand risks that are not obvious at 13 or 14.
Round three: the numbers
Deniz: Let’s talk about some uncomfortable data points: The US National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, tested facial age estimation and could only place a 13-year-old within one year of their actual age about a third of the time. When the UK's age checks went live last summer, Proton reported a 1,400% jump in VPN signups. And in Australia, which brought in age verification last year, the Molly Rose Foundation found that over 60% of teenagers who had accounts before the ban still had access to at least one platform afterwards.
Guillaume: I'm a statistician by training, so I love this. You can say a lot of things with numbers. If you start from zero, a 1,400% jump is easy. People went from not needing a VPN to needing one, that's all that shows.
Deniz: It shows the workaround is trivial.
Guillaume: Or it shows the law is working, and the 60% figure is actually great news. You changed a law and you saved 40% of a generation. Hundreds of thousands of children who'll have a better life. And the evasion rate will fall as enforcement improves. Why do you need it to be perfect on day one?
Round four: what a ban actually does to a platform
Deniz: So what will this age group do if they're not on social media? Where will they go? I don’t think they’ll stop using the internet or social media at all. We were talking about messaging platforms the other day. They’re mostly encrypted, so abuse is hard to detect there. If minors are banned from social media , they move to platforms like that. And how does an encrypted platform even know someone is a minor in the first place?
Guillaume: That is different. There's no advertising by default, no feed algorithm, no attention economy. It isn't engineered to maximise your attention the way social media is.
Deniz: Then are you actually against social media, or against targeted advertising to minors? Because those are two very different bans, and only one of them needs an age check on every platform on the internet.
Round five: moral panic, or genuine harm
Deniz: There's Cambridge research from Prof. Prof Sander van der Linden finding no consistent evidence that social media is inherently harmful. Prof. Sonia Livingstone OBE also argues that this is just an ‘easy win’ with no evidence. Yes, some social media content is toxic and it can be used as a tool for committing very serious crimes against children, but there's nothing about the concept of social media that inherently makes it harmful. So when we're trying to enforce these types of bans, are we actually disempowering young people and taking rights away from them rather than holding social media companies accountable for fixing their products and fixing the business model of social media?
Guillaume: I’d like to see that research, because research can be biased based on the researcher’s beliefs, funding, many things. You can also find opinions from experts who say the opposite, look at Prof. Jonathan Haidt’s response for example. Or look at cigarettes. Big Tobacco paid a lot of money to make the public think they were healthy at the beginning, and then people started getting cancer, and it turned out to be far worse than we thought. It just took twenty years to prove. With Instagram there was a proper randomised controlled trial showing mental well-being dropped significantly with longer exposure.
Deniz: I could also say that the same arguments you're making now were made about the printing press, and about television. Every generation is sure the newest technology will ruin its children. But you can't both lean on a study and dismiss the studies that don't suit you.
Guillaume: Do you really think you need a study? Just watch children in front of their phones. Go anywhere, watch them, and you'll see something isn't right. They're completely stuck.
Round six: whose job is this
Deniz: Okay. Let me ask you a simple question. If a 14-year-old is on TikTok at one in the morning, whose job is it to stop that? The government's, the platform's, or the parents'?
Guillaume: It’s a shared responsibility. Of course, it starts with the parents. But what this shows parents is that they are not alone in fighting this anymore. TikTok will have to be much stricter and do risk assessments in the UK to make sure they’re complying with the law. The government is responsible to ensure that a law is not just a piece of paper but that it's actually enforced. It should be a very collaborative approach.
Deniz: Yes, but if it's if it's everyone's job, then that means it's no one's job. It's like a RACI chart in project management. You never make everyone accountable, because then nobody truly is.
Guillaume: So the alternative is to do nothing.
Deniz: The alternative is to be honest that a ban with no social programmes behind it is the easy version. It makes a good headline. But if a child has a difficult relationship with their parents, banning social media does nothing for the underlying problem. I just don't think the ban is the silver bullet we're hoping for.
Guillaume: I never said it was a silver bullet. I said this one law might be impactful enough to overshadow the rest. The single biggest change in my life as a young parent was France banning smoking inside restaurants. Overnight, I could suddenly breathe. Imperfect laws still change everything.
Where we actually agreed
Deniz: Before we close, I want both of us to do the same thing, which is to name one point that the other person made that you agree with.
Guillaume: I agree it's not a silver bullet, and there's a lot more to do than just this. You pointed that out correctly, and I mostly agree with you.
Deniz: And I agree it shouldn't only be the parents' responsibility to keep children off social media. It should be shared between the platforms and the government. And maybe saving 40% of children is better than doing nothing.
We both walked away believing the same thing underneath the argument: minors need safer, age-appropriate experiences whether or not there's a ban, and the messy transition from "blocked at 15 years and 11 months" to "allowed at 16" needs far more thought than it's getting. The protections shouldn't switch on or off just because it’s someone’s birthday.
There's no formula for this. But the conversation we keep having in public is about whether to ban. The conversation we should be having is how you'd actually enforce one, and what happens to the kids the enforcement misses.
If you’re curious about what this means for media owners, marketplaces, gaming, dating, review sites and social platforms, this is exactly the enforcement problem Checkstep helps solve. We can help you operationalise age assurance, appeals, false positives, child-risk detection, migration to less visible channels, and the need for other protections that do not simply switch off at 16.
If you'd like to learn more, we're offering an exclusive 1-1 with Deniz for a limited time only. Click the link below to schedule a time to meet.
