In late 2025, the UK’s digital landscape is undergoing a radical and controversial transformation. The Starmer government, emboldened by Australia’s ‘minimum age’ legislation, seems to be increasingly pivoting towards a policy of total exclusion for under-16s on social media.
However, as explored in previous articles, such as The New Online Safety Act: Safety or Authoritarianism? and Digital ID: But Where is the Mandate?, this hard-line approach is not merely a technical challenge. It represents a potential constitutional crisis that threatens the delicate balance of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and breaches international human rights standards.
The Australian blueprint: a draconian precedent
On 10 December 2025, Australia’s landmark social media ban for under-16s came into full effect, targeting platforms like TikTok, Meta and X with fines of up to AUD 49.5mn for non-compliance. The law hinges on geolocation rather than residency, meaning underage tourists, including those from the UK, are automatically swept into the ban upon arrival.
Ministers in London, including Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, have confirmed they are closely monitoring this development. While Nandy initially cited concerns over enforceability, she has left the door open to adopting similar measures if the Australian ‘experiment’ proves successful. Parallel to this, several US states, including Florida and Texas, have passed their own age-verification and parental-consent laws, signalling a coordinated Western drift toward a more restrictive internet.
The Belfast divergence: a border in the browser
The most profound legal threat in a UK context lies in the unique status of Northern Ireland. Under the Belfast Agreement, individuals in Northern Ireland have the absolute right to identify as Irish, British, or both.
If the UK implements an Australia-style ban via UK-specific Digital ID, it creates an immediate divergence:
- The Rights Gap: An Irish citizen in Dublin remains under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which generally protects a ‘digital age of consent’ (13–16).
- The ‘Two Tiers’ of Citizenship: A 15-year-old Irish citizen in Belfast would find their rights curtailed compared to their counterparts in the Republic.
This arguably violates Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which mandates “no diminution of right” in Northern Ireland post-Brexit. By enforcing a UK-specific digital ‘iron curtain,’ the government is effectively creating a digital border in the Irish Sea.
VPN restrictions: a collision with international human rights
To enforce these bans, the government is exploring tracking and blocking Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). A recent House of Lords amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill proposes raising VPN age limits to 18, forcing providers to use “highly effective age assurance”.
This potentially conflicts with the Council of Europe’s Budapest Convention and UN Resolutions A/HRC/29/32 and A/RES/78/213, which protect anonymity as vital for freedom of expression and national security. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has warned, lawmakers pushing these bans”have no idea what they’re doing.”
The government is hurting more than just bypassers:
- Businesses & Students: Companies and universities rely on VPNs for secure remote work and research database access.
- Vulnerable Groups: Domestic abuse survivors, journalists, and activists use VPNs to hide from abusers or state surveillance.
- Everyday Privacy: Regular people use VPNs to prevent ISPs and corporations from building profiles of their browsing history.
The security paradox: contradicting law enforcement
The push to block or ‘age-gate’ VPNs is not only a human rights issue but a national security risk. Many UK security and law enforcement agencies, including the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Police UK, the Metropolitan Police and the South East Cyber Resilience Centre, actively recommend VPN use.
VPNs are essential for:
- Cybersecurity: Protecting businesses and charities from ransomware and public Wi-Fi attacks.
- Personal Safety: Safeguarding individuals from online stalking, domestic abuse, and harassment.
- Privacy: Ensuring that sensitive personal data is encrypted from prying eyes.
Forcing age-verification on VPN providers would require users to hand over sensitive biometric or ID data to the very services they use for privacy, creating a ‘honeypot’ for hackers and identity thieves. It is a staggering policy contradiction for the government to mandate the weakening of tools that its own police forces recommend for public safety.
In other countries, authorities such as the Garda Síochána (Irish police) and Europol provide similar advice regarding VPN usage.
Cross-border friction for visitors to Great Britain
The impact of these policies creates a significant ‘digital friction’ for those visiting Great Britain from the Republic of Ireland or the EU:
- Identification lock-out: if social media access requires a UK-recognised Digital ID, visitors may find their Irish or EU digital credentials are incompatible.
- The Common Travel Area (CTA): movement is not truly free if one’s digital life is terminated upon crossing the border. A 15-year-old visitor from Dublin could find their accounts disabled the moment they connect to a UK network, undermining the spirit of the CTA.
Exclusion by design: the impact on LGBTQ+ and Trans communities
Beyond children, age-verification mandates are creating a secondary crisis for the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender and non-binary individuals. As highlighted by Tech Policy Press, current ‘age estimation’ algorithms and document-based systems are frequently biased or incompatible with trans lives; biometric systems often fail to recognise trans faces or incorrectly gauge age due to the effects of hormone replacement therapy on soft facial tissues.
For the many transgender people who lack identity documents correctly reflecting their name or gender, these checks force an impossible choice: provide documents with ‘deadnames’ that risk outing them or lose access to essential online support networks and healthcare resources entirely. This creates a form of digital segregation, as broad definitions of harmful content often lead platforms to pre-emptively censor LGBTQ+ education and community spaces to avoid the 10% global turnover fines mandated by the Online Safety Act, effectively locking vulnerable adults out of the digital public square.
Public backlash: millions demand repeal of online safety and digital ID schemes
In late 2025, the UK government is facing significant public and parliamentary pressure regarding the implementation of the Online Safety Act and the newly announced Digital ID scheme. E-petition 722903, which garnered over 550,000 signatures, calls for the repeal of the Online Safety Act on the grounds that its scope is “far broader and restrictive than is necessary in a free society,” particularly highlighting how the compliance burden and the 10% global turnover fine are forcing small online forums and community sites to close. Simultaneously, the government’s plan to introduce a mandatory Digital ID for right-to-work checks, announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in September 2025, has triggered one of the most signed petitions in British history with nearly 3 million signatures, as citizens and civil liberties groups raise alarms over ‘mission creep’, mass surveillance infrastructure, and the potential for a ‘society on licence’. While the government maintains that these measures are proportionate and essential for child safety and immigration control, the debate packages from the House of Commons Library reveal a deep-seated constitutional tension between the drive for digital security and the protection of fundamental privacy and freedom of expression rights.
The manifesto gap and institutional hypocrisy
A critical look at the 2024 Labour Party Manifesto reveals a total absence of these hard enforcement measures. There was no mention of a total ban for under-16s, mandatory national Digital ID, or the regulation of VPN usage.
Furthermore, reports from Politico and Tom’s Guide have highlighted a glaring double standard: while debating bans for the public, many UK politicians have claimed VPN subscriptions as office expenses. This hypocrisy underscores a desperate need for an independent anti-corruption body in the UK, similar to those in countries like Ukraine, to address the misuse of public funds and the lack of accountability in government conduct.
Harmonisation as a solution: the case for the EU digital framework
The most logical escape route from this looming constitutional and regulatory quagmire is for the UK to transition from the idiosyncratic Online Safety Act toward alignment with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA). Rejoining the European Single Market, including the Digital Single Market, would provide a stable, rights-based framework that the current UK legislation lacks.
Transitioning to the EU framework would offer several critical benefits:
- Restoring the Belfast balance: by adopting the DSA, the UK would automatically realign the digital rights of citizens in Belfast with those in Dublin. This would eliminate the ‘digital sea border’ and ensure that the equivalence of rights guaranteed by the Belfast Agreement and the Windsor Framework is upheld.
- Proportionate safety over draconian bans: unlike the UK’s drift toward total bans for under-16s, the DSA focuses on systemic risk management, transparency, and algorithmic accountability. It protects children without requiring the mass surveillance of adults through mandatory Digital IDs or VPN blocks.
- Economic efficiency for businesses: currently, UK tech firms must navigate two separate and often conflicting compliance regimes. Aligning with the Digital Single Market would remove these dual-compliance costs, allowing British businesses to scale seamlessly across the continent.
- Ending gatekeeper monopolies: the DMA provides robust tools to challenge digital gatekeepers, ensuring that smaller UK innovators have fair access to app stores and search engines – protections that are far more prescriptive and enforceable than the current UK proposals.
Protecting minors is complex: alternatives exist
Ultimately, rejoining the Digital Single Market would replace a ‘mission creep’ approach to safety with a proven, international legal standard that prioritises both safety and fundamental human rights.
While critics often cite the EU’s proposed Chat Control regulation as evidence of overreach, it is worth noting that this measure has faced significant resistance and is unlikely to be implemented in its current form. At the same time, the EU is exploring age verification mechanisms for online services in which the EU is proposing the European Digital Identity (EUDI) wallet as a secure digital wallet for citizens to manage credentials like IDs and attributes across public and private services, a move that mirrors proposed approaches in the UK and Australia, and under consideration in several US states.
The issue of age verification is, however, complex: protecting minors from inappropriate content such as pornographic websites is a legitimate policy goal, but it must be balanced carefully against the need to preserve users’ privacy and online anonymity, particularly as it risks paving the way for broader Digital ID mandates that could enable mass surveillance. This evolving regulatory landscape suggests that harmonisation with the EU framework would not mean an uncritical adoption of every emerging proposal but rather participation in a broader rights-focused dialogue about proportionality, privacy, and safety in the digital sphere.
I believe firmly in online safety; however, there are alternative methods to restrict minors – such as device-level parental controls, privacy-preserving edge-computing, and enhanced media literacy – that do not require breaching the digital rights and anonymity of adult users.
This article was created with the help of AI to help the author deal with dylexia.
