The UK is experimenting with social media bans on hundreds of families

The government of the United Kingdom is launching pilots to study the effects of social media bans, curfews, and time limits for applications on families.

The pilots are implemented to assess the impact of restrictions on children, including on sleep, family life, and schoolwork.

A total of 300 families will participate in the pilots. Each of them will be assigned to one of the four interventions the UK government is considering.

One group of parents will be instructed on how to use parental controls to control access to selected social media apps. A second group will implement a one-hour-per-day cap on the most popular social media apps for teenagers, such as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.

A third group will block social media for their children between 9 pm and 7 am, leaving them access to the apps before and after school hours. Lastly, a fourth group will be recruited to continue to give children the same access to social media they already have.

Both teenagers and parents will be interviewed at the beginning and the end of the pilot to study the effects of limiting social media use. Participants will also be asked about the practical challenges they faced, such as setting up parental controls or responding to workarounds that teenagers found.

The government will use the collected data to formulate policies that are meant to protect children on social media.

“We are determined to give young people the childhood they deserve and to prepare them for the future. These pilots will give us the evidence we need to take the next steps, informed by the experiences of families themselves,” says Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology.

The current administration in the UK is considering a social media ban for kids under a certain age.

To see how parents, children, civil society, and experts think of the subject, the government launched a consultation on the use of social media by children in January.

During the consultation, the government wants to discuss a plethora of topics, including how to determine the right minimum age for children to access social media, a potential ban of social media for children “under a certain age,” explore how to implement better age checks so children can access suitable, harmless content, and restrictions on addictive features, such as infinite scrolling.