June has been a busy month for UK digital regulators. Hot on the heels of the Competition and Markets Authority’s obligations on Google to give commercial publishers the right to opt out of their content appearing in AI search features comes Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announcement that the UK will be introducing age-gating regulations, taking effect in 2027, restricting social media access by under-16s.

The UK ban, like those in other jurisdictions, explicitly derives from the world-leading Australian regulations implemented in December 2025. The measure represents a fundamental shift away from the UK’s historic risk‑based, platform‑duty model of platform constraints in the existing Online Safety Act toward age‑based prohibition and intensive age verification.

The announced under-16 social media ban emerges from a confluence of factors: sustained public anxiety about children’s mental health and online harms, the political opportunity created by cross‑party competition to appear “tough” on tech, and the institutional path‑dependence of the Online Safety Act’s child‑safety framing. Polling has indicated very high levels of public support—a YouGov survey found that about three‑quarters of Britons favor a ban on social media for under‑16s—creating a permissive environment for more radical interventions than those originally contemplated in the Online Safety Act.

The anticipated UK law shares many common factors with the Australian ban.  Specifically, it elevates the pursuit of a single objective—protecting under 16s from some social media harms—over the protection of all other rights associated with the use of online tools by all other users. Conspicuously absent from debate about the UK ban, as in Australia, has been discussion of difficult questions around proportionality, rights, enforceability, and regulatory coherence.

The question of proportionality in social media age-gating regulation is the subject of a paper that Petrus Potgieter and I will present later this month at the International Telecommunications Society’s 25th Biennial Conference in Tokyo. Proportionality analysis considers whether a proposed piece of legislation meets four tests:

1. Does it have a legitimate aim?

2. Is there a rational connection? (Is it suitable for the task?)

3. Is it necessary? (Is there a less intrusive alternative?)

4. Is it proportional in the narrow sense? (Do benefits outweigh burdens?)

Proportionality analysis is especially useful for assessing proposals where an intervention (such as age gating) involves competing rights and principles—in this case, the rights of under-16s to be kept safe versus their rights to free speech (their ability to use social media platforms to express themselves) and the rights of those over 16 to access the platforms freely, with minimal inconvenience (because age gating requires all users to verify their age). Yet there is scant evidence that the regulations in Australia or those announced for the UK have been assessed in this way.

Our paper addresses this want by putting the Australian regulations through such an analysis. While the law’s aim may be legitimate, we find that the connection between the intervention and the harms avoided is rather opaque in theory and especially ineffective in practice. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese admitted prior to the legislation being implemented that it was not going to stop all access and harm; subsequent analysis confirms that around 70 percent of under-16s using social media before the ban continue to use it. Furthermore, technological tools intended to assist enforcement (such as age estimation from photographs and usage habits) have a false positive rate over 60 percent for 14- and 15-year-olds. That is, they are more likely to classify a minor as an adult than to classify them correctly. Alternatives such as greater education and adult supervision are likely more effective and less intrusive, challenging the necessity of the law.

Moreover, a strict proportionality test, using German legal theorist Robert Alexey’s formula for trading off the effects of legislation on two competing constitutional rights or principles, provides interesting results. To determine whether a statutory intervention is justified, Alexey’s formula weighs the importance of each right or principle, the seriousness of the law’s interference with those rights or principles, the certainty of the assumptions behind the intervention, and the probability that the measure will deliver the desired effect.

When comparing freedom of expression and access to information for the whole population against protecting minors from social media harms, Potgieter and I conclude that the Australian regulations were not justified using Alexey’s formula. The intervention would be justified only if the need to protect children from social media harm was considered superior to protecting the free speech rights of the whole population. This result can be attributed largely to the ineffectiveness of the Australian legislation in protecting minors from harm.

Our paper thus reckons age-gating proposals as disproportionate restrictions on the rights of children and society at large. Or as Amnesty International has observed, “right diagnosis, wrong prescription.”

The paper, “Age-Verification Mechanisms and Age Restrictions Versus Proportionality, Privacy and Freedom of Expression,” will be released into the public domain following the conference. An advance copy (for information, but not citation) can be obtained by emailing bronwyn.howell@vuw.ac.nz.