Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram Lead the Apps Children Name in Abuse Counselling
Childline said Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram were the top platforms children named in counselling about online sexual abuse last year.
The social media ban for under-16s is due to come into force in 2027. Simmons-Read said it "doesn't go far enough", could be bypassed by criminals and could even discourage young people from speaking up about online grooming. His preferred instrument is platform-side: he wants tech companies to invest more in detecting exploitation when it is happening on their services — a request that resists a campaign slogan.
Ellen Roome, who has campaigned for improvements to online safety since the death of her son Jools in 2022, says not enough is being done to protect young people on social media. That complaint survives whichever instrument you prefer.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Roome's stronger claim is that children are regularly fed violent or grooming material, and that as things stand no platform is fully safe for them. If you accept that, banning under-16s and funding detection stop looking like rival philosophies and start looking like rival answers to one question: who is supposed to notice, and how early?
The asymmetry matters, though. A ban is announced once and can be routed around; the detection work Simmons-Read is asking for has to keep running, on every service, forever, with no ribbon-cutting. That doesn't make an age ban useless — it makes it a floor, not a solution.
The prevention side sees a different gap. Children often don't file people they meet online under "strangers", and they expect friendliness at the start rather than nastiness. A warning built on suspecting the first message may be answering a question children aren't actually asking.