Bolton councillors have backed plans to ban social media for children under the age of 16.
A meeting of the full council debated a motion put forward by Labour’s young person’s champion, Coun Robert Morrisey, which he said would help combat technology addiction and protect youth mental health.
He said unchecked social media platforms have become breeding grounds for malicious activity, where online anonymity enables cyberbullying, hate speech, catfishing, and predatory grooming.
Motion details
Coun Morrisey added that existing age-verification methods rely on easily bypassed self-declaration, meaning the proposed under-16 ban will fail without a robust mechanism to verify who is actually behind an account. The motion said implementing mandatory, secure ID verification for social media platforms ‘is a necessary step and the only foolproof way to enforce the under-16 ban’, ensuring every profile is tied to a traceable, real-world identity.
Coun Morrisey said: “This is not an attack on the use of the internet and young people. It is about ensuring that we have real safety nets for kids on line, so they can experience the positive educational benefits and social benefits of the internet, seeing and experiencing a world that they might not have at their fingertips on their doorstep, or that they can access on line, while ensuring that kids are protected thoroughly as well. It’s national legislation which is needed to overturn this issue. But I think, as a council, we have a deep responsibility to make a position on this issue, especially as corporate parents to our kids in care. By having ID verification actually implemented into legislation for all social media accounts, it doesn’t just allow to regulate the ages of people on social media. It has wider benefits of combating abuse, combating predatory behaviour, grooming, harassing on line that currently sits very comfortably behind anonymous social media accounts and virtual private networks that almost make it impossible to track where there is genuine criminal activity on line.”
Councillor David Grant opposed the motion. He said: “Nobody in this chamber disputes the absolute necessity of keeping our children safe from malicious on line activity, toxic abuse, and predators, but a blanket ban is a completely counter-productive, poorly thought-out mechanism that treats a complex cultural problem with a blunt instrument. To claim this ban is fool proof is completely detached from the technological reality. Any teenager with a smartphone can download a free VPN and, within 30 seconds, bypass self-declaration parameters, moving through servers that the UK government cannot ban. Over-regulation doesn’t eliminate the risk; it simply drives the activity completely underground, making it harder for parents to track and infinitely more difficult for police to investigate and target actual criminality.”
Vote outcome
The motion was passed by 42 votes to 14. The council will now write to the Prime Minister and the technology secretary, endorsing the proposed social media ban for under-16s and will urge the government and Ofcom to include a statutory mandate for secure ID verification across all social media platforms.
