Ofcom sets out “highly effective” UK age checks for Under 16s social media ban
The UK telecoms, media and internet content regulator, Ofcom, has today set out how they will define “highly effective” Age Verification systems. Such systems are set to become a mandatory requirement as part of the Government’s controversial move to introduce an online Social Media ban for children under the age of 16 – for use against the most popular platforms (Facebook, Instagram etc.).
As part of this policy the Government’s Secretary of State asked Ofcom to carry out a rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance could look like for determining whether someone is 16 or over. The regulator has since identified four age assurance methods that they claim are “currently capable of being highly effective“: photo ID matching, digital ID services, banking-based checks and facial age estimation.
Service providers could also offer adults (over 18s) three additional methods identified in the regulator’s existing guidance. The catch in all this is that the Government’s rules will also impact adult users of social media services, since they will face the same checks.
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Ofcom does, however, state that “some users” with existing accounts may not need to complete an age check if the service already holds accurate and reliable information to establish they are over the required age.
Ofcom’s report does also acknowledge that “no age assurance method is completely robust against circumvention by children“. Social media services will thus need to implement highly effective age assurance in full, including “taking practical measures to tackle circumvention by children” (identifying this could be tricky). The regulator intends to monitor circumvention by children, such as via VPNs, and will publish a report on it within twelve months of the ban coming into effect.
The UK Government has said it intends to publish its first set of regulations for the ban before the end of 2026. Ofcom are also busy developing draft guidance for social media platforms, and will consult on this as soon as the Government’s regulations are laid in Parliament.
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The new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has already made clear that he also wants the protections to be “built into” Smartphones too and “switched on by default“. The government also wants to extend such restrictions to apps used by children. Few could disagree with the objective here. But on the flip side, not everybody will like the idea of the Government having such control over our individual devices (Smartphones etc.) and Social Media access.
Tech and civil society groups have previously expressed worry over how making access to common online services too restrictive could inhibit their use by adults and risk significant consequences, particularly if applied to online services of all sizes (e.g. harmless smaller services often have no viable way of adding Age Verification). The result could be censorship by the backdoor of excessive legal liability, forcing the closure of such services.
At the same time many adults remain uncomfortable with having their access restricted from using vital communication / chat services or devices until such time as they agree to share their personal biometric or financial data with often unknown, unfamiliar and unregulated third-party age verification organisations. The previous privacy breach of UK user’s government ID data at Discord (here) helps to underline this concern.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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No one voted to ban the internet which is essentially what this means and has absolutely nothing to do with children. This is evidenced by the fact they wanted to do away with the photo id to vote
Years ago people were calling digital IDs as a conspiracy theory but now they want a papers please society just to watch a video.
Open any platform and see massive waves of criticism when the government posts anything. When the official gov account posted about the clock setting back they had so much backlash that they even blocked replies. The political elites want to replicate Germany and sue the people criticizing them, inconvenient that people can have anonymous accounts or can be hard to locate with just the real name. With digital ID they can just cudgel Mark Zuckerberg into complying and handover people’s digital ID details. Political arrests will only skyrocket and then the government power will be further entrenched
Dark days ahead
Given they are now sending police to drag 15 year old kids out of bed for mocking local politicians I think we are already there. You are right. Something is going very wrong with this country. And other commenters have said vote for change but their first has to be a party offering it. Even the Lib Dems who used to be reliable champions of civil liberties are backing this lot.
I wonder how many people know of this insanely dystopian 15 year old story
A 15 year old boy basically added a bunny filter to a labour councillors photo and then later the police arrested him, seized his devices and intimidated his family. A bunny filter. It needs to be spread far and wide how evil and how low the bar for arrests is
The follow up is that people started adding all sorts of funny and hilarious edits of this councillor. Now he deleted his account. Pure Streisand effect but shows how valuable free speech is and what the political elites are trying to hide
Small detail, but the “bunny filter” meme actually involved a Conservative councillor.
I despise the nanny state.
Sigh. We need a big swing in our politics to fix all this fascism. We need to stop voting for the lesser evil and start voting for actual change.
This is the Karenocracy in action, courtesy of the witches who run Ofcom. I did try to warn people before each general election that this was the road we were heading down, but too many are brainwashed with “fink of da children” to not be apathetic about it.
God bless VPN 🙂
It’s becoming Idiocracy to require to give data to third party…. .
In all websites, who ask for date of birth I always giving fake date of birth, spam email address. So soon I won’t be able to use facebook,
VPNs are in the crosshairs and will soon require the same age verifications.
I echo what others have said, this country is broken and its only going to get worse.
@Phil there no current plans ban or force age verification on VPNs, The Gov backtracked on that a while ago.
@Anonymous Yeah and the government used to criticise China for doing exactly what they themselves are doing today. ID checks were only going to be for adult content initially. Now it’s already expanded to social media and to other services like YouTube and gaming. It will be expanded further. You can’t believe a word they say.
As it says in the article they are monitoring circumvention and you can be sure VPNs will be used widely for this purpose. There will be stories in the media of some kid who used a VPN to access something harmful which will be linked, without evidence, with some horrific crime he committed. We have seen the same media pattern a million times video nasties, video games. It’s inevitable they will come for VPNs in the next year or two.
What the gov says now is pretty meaningless considering they literally uturn on everything, from oil drilling to jury trials… Andy Bum-em said brexit was a done deal, and he said he would not implement digital id yet here we are: want to see this youtube cat video? upload your bank statement. what can go wrong
“Think of the children”.. universal bs about caring for the young, but screwing us over as demanded by the tabloids and their stooges the BBC. It never bothered them when pedos were rampant as seen by j king or j saville..
You hit the correct target. The problem was never the abusers
The problem is that people are exposing the abusers and now if a whistleblower or even someone reposting has their digital id attached they can immediately be arrested or worse. Ann widecombe got murdered very recently which should highlight the need to privacy, not have everything in very easy to hack or hijack
Think of who has the children and who is supposed to be responsible for them, that’s not the government, unless perhaps they introduce a parenting licence at last, and neuter those who aren’t fit or capable of being responsible parents… After all Rights have Responsibilities – can’t deliver the Responsibility, then don’t get / loose the right, a bit like a driving licence, but then there are no reliable and consistent responsible policings these days.
Ooo and what happens if an under age uses an overage ‘account’ how is that really protecting the underage, go figure ofcon.
Interestingly Apple wanted to check my age, but said i must be over 18 as i had been buying Apple kit for quite a long time.
Oh its by the way its unfair and insulting to witches as stated in the earlier post, like any group of people they have good ones and bad ones. (and they don’t go around in pointy hats)
For years I was very anti-Apple, but curiously they now seem to be far and away the less evil of all the big tech companies. Not only do they use common sense (as in this example of understanding someone must be old enough from their long purchase history) but they’ve also stood up against government’s who try and enforce legislation that would harm the privacy of their customers.
Sure they are very far from perfect, but they do seem significantly better, as far as personal data protection goes, than the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon.
Basically Digital ID by the back door and you are incredibly naive if you think it has anything to do with protecting children, it is ALL about control and monitoring of what the masses do and say online, it will all be monitored by Ai super computers.
Social media platform owners aren’t responsible. They don’t give a monkeys what users get up to.
I’m behind delaying young people accessing it for so many reasons. I’d like to see many adults blocked from using it too.
From someone who knows how easy is it to access very bad stuff online for those under 16. The government. Really needs to somehow ban the TOR network because I is currently both the easiest and the only way to anonymously look up something I wouldn’t even want my worst enemy to see.
I’m in favour of it. There is some terrible content out there for adults, let alone kids and teenagers. To my mind adults are free to do what they like online within the law but also need education, including how to think critically and ensure safety online for younger users.
Well said Brian
Children cannot buy an internet connection.
You solve online safety with better education, not fascist control.
This makes the internet even more dangerous as sketchy sites pop up to replace ID-blocked mainstream ones.
Anyone in favour of this control is just extremely short-sighted or uneducated on the matter.
I wonder if the extra-territorial social media companies might say ‘We’ve had enough of your government strictures – so UP YOURS foreigners. Anyway we NEED your teen influencers to get people to buy our stuff!’
But this country can’t set up an equivalent of Baidu, Yandex or other domestic media services – not that we should IMHO. The skillset is probably lacking and there ain’t the money – except for politicians and their lackeys.
And where are parents in all this? Do they have any say in what HMG carry out for our ‘benefit’? Yes there is a lot of nastiness that the ‘net has permitted but Pandora is well and truly out of the box and there ain’t any way to push back. I would not be surprised if HMG mandates a ‘Great British Firewall’ to protect ‘the children’ (in reality everybody) from that pernicious foreign Social Media stuff.
Judging by the tone of previous messages, there is a great deal of unrest about our freedoms. And that is just about age checking here.
The other end of this it’s hitting older folk. My neighbour 92 has an iPad, and is constantly nagged by Apple to age verify, no valid passport, no valid driving licence and doesn’t posses a Credit Card. He does have a London Freedom Bus Pass and a Debit Card, which Apple doesn’t use. Poor chap gets so distraught over this impossible situation of pop up age verifications.
This looks to be the right solution!
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/16/the-right-way-to-do-age-verification-checks/
A few issues with that off the top of my head:
You’re telling every website who you bank with.
Single use can’t be enforced without centralised validation. Though I don’t think it really needs to be – a 5 minute expiry should be fine.
And the big one – money, It would have to be a service provided for free by the bank. The article suggests banks would be paid by the websites but this means only websites banks are willing to have a financial relationship with can use the system. We don’t want banks being gatekeepers of what websites are allowed to exist. Secondly in order to bill accurately the bank would need to track where its tokens are used and we are back to the root of why existing similar solutions like Yoti are not acceptable – the privacy is gone.
@john_r “You’re telling every website who you bank with.”
Not so – the website is told only that you have an account with a regulated UK bank, but not which one.
Absolutely no chance all banks would agree to share the same private key. They will be unique per bank. And even if the key is nominally secret it only takes one customer from each bank to reveal where they got their key from to compromise everybody else.
As someone who had a go on MySpace TWO DECADES AGO, I’d like to know why it is only now that they want to ban them. Are these websites somehow far worse than they were in the past?
I don’t agree with these bans one bit, but if they are so serious about it, why didn’t they ban then 10 or 15 years ago?
They’ve realised how much harm they’re doing. Shame it’s taken so long.
The world would be better without Facebook, X and several others
If they where serious then they’d utilise the BBC as an Internet safe browse proxy.
idea would be for teh BBC to develop an online proxy to scrub pages people browse through for content not suitable for children. The proxy config could be loaded on devices and then any and all users can utilise it for safe browsing with a bounty for any one reporting not safe content with the 3rd party site paying said bounty which would be split by the end user & the bbc.
yes apps can also go through the proxy. service providers & especially mobile providers could route all their traffic via said proxy until told otherwise by the consumer
could even be a BBC proxy app that consumers can then access their app/sites via it.
bandwidth is not expensive in 2026 & even if it was a concern, large sites like Facebook, YouTube etc could implement a clone of the proxy so marked traffic gets the bbc provided scanning.
yes it won’t be perfect but neither is this proposal.
Idea being here is that it would be an easy option for consumers to choose to use while leaving the rest of the web as a free for all as it is now.
responsible parents can choose to use it, irresponsible ones can ignore it just as they will do with age verification by verifying for their kids.
no login to the proxy, just an expectation that everything going via it would be filtered.
logic can be put into it so that sites that don’t need proxying just go direct, things like banks, doctors, major streaming platforms etc,
any site that doesn’t require a login to view can go through the filter to ensure content is scrubbed appropriately. images could be checksummed so that known good images are let through whilst unknown get scrubbed & their checksum either added to the god or banned list etc etc. approved images get served quicker.
They want to force this on all of us to maximise compliance instead of trusting citizens to use their own judgment.
the current approach also makes state mandated future censorship of everything easier to accomplish, stating science is not settled could lead to removal of all sorts of freedoms etc when currently there is much harder for authorities to enforce.
Starmer promised to tread lighter on our lives and did the opposite.
If Ofcom and politicians wanted to protect children they’d make parents legally liable to enable parental controls on children’s device as well as educate them on how to do so and explain the benefits as shown in the governments own research and trials!
However the goal with the online safety act is simply to end the anonymous internet and introduce digital id, that’s why the overwhelming majority of politicians everywhere support it because it’s an authoritarian fascist goal.
Imagine a world with mandated digital ID and identity verification to use the internet. If you care about mass immigration do you think you would be allowed to talk about it online? If you care about Zionism then do you think you will be able to talk about it online?