The week the government’s Growing Up in the Online World consultation closed, we submitted a response on behalf of 46 young people aged 8 to 21. This post sets out what we found from reviewing questions from the Young Person’s Survey (aimed at young people 10-21, with questions modified from the full consultation). We lay out below what came out of it.
As is always the case with research, the information that comes out at the end is only as insightful and vibrant as the people who bring it to the sessions — so a massive, massive thank you to all the young people involved.
The full consultation response is linked at the end.
What came out of thinking about the questions
“What even is social media?” — the definition problem
The term “social media” is vaguely defined in the young person’s survey (it is not defined at all in the full consultation). For participants, this was not a minor irritation. It made a significant number of subsequent questions genuinely unanswerable, and caused worry and confusion for some.
The disagreements were substantive. Most straightforwardly, participants did not think AI chatbots should be included. Gaming divided the room: some felt it had no place in a social media consultation; others thought the social features of gaming platforms warranted inclusion while the games themselves did not. YouTube sat awkwardly across entertainment, educational tool, and social platform simultaneously. Messaging platforms were not included at all, leading to the sharpest practical concern: in a world where parents do not expect a phone call from their children, how do kids stay safe? How do they communicate?
The concern underneath all of this is scope creep. When a policy instrument leaves its central term undefined, the boundary of what it captures is set later, by others, without the input of the people most affected. Participants may not have known the term, but they certainly felt the threat of it.
Social media is infrastructure, not entertainment
As inferred above, communication was the most frequently cited benefit of social media, by a significant margin — it is a utility, one that young people are socialised into and really can’t opt out of. Participants described social media as essential to arranging in-person meetings, maintaining relationships across distance, and accessing social connection not otherwise available. Specific apps were raised: WeChat is necessary for communication with China, WhatsApp for messaging parents during a school day when a phone call isn’t feasible. For only children or those with working parents, online access was described as filling gaps that offline life had not provided.
The policy conversation has framed restriction as substitution. Our participants understood it as removal.
Social media produces complex emotional responses — and that’s not the same as harm
When faced with a multiple choice question on how social media made them feel, many participants ticked almost every option available — happy, excited, relaxed alongside worried, lonely, stressed — noting it simply depended on too many things to answer cleanly. Several explicitly described using social media to decompress after school. For them, relaxation was not incidental to their use. It was the point.
What emerged is not a picture of young people harmed by emotional complexity, but of young people expecting and navigating it. Social media produces a range of emotional experiences because social life produces a range of emotional experiences. Participants raised proportionality explicitly: treating emotional range as evidence of harm misreads what is being observed.
This has a specific policy implication. Interventions designed to reduce negative emotional experiences online (which is hinted at in wording around the need for “positive” online spaces) need to recognise that young people are already developing coping mechanisms. It shouldn’t stop there, but it should take it into account.
What the process revealed
“Addicted” doesn’t mean what the policy documents think it means
“Addicted” appeared frequently in our data — in writing, in discussion, across every age group. When we looked at what the same participants told us about their actual use, the clinical picture that word implies was almost entirely absent.
Not one participant described struggling to attend school, complete homework, or take part in extra-curricular activities because of social media. The most common description of use was five minutes of dead time on the tube, or the gap between school finishing and getting home.
“Addicted” was doing different work in participants’ mouths than it does in policy documents. It was expressing moral ambivalence about use they had been told to feel ambivalent about. Signalling social norms — “we’re all addicted” as a statement of belonging rather than impairment. Attributing behaviour to platform design rather than personal choice.
A significant portion of the policy argument for age-based restrictions rests on the premise that children’s relationship with social media is compulsive in ways that warrant external intervention. Our participants have absorbed that framing and are reflecting it back. That is not the same as it describing their lived experience.
Young people can see the cliff-edge
Participants across all age groups articulated, without prompting, the cliff-edge problem: a young person who encounters social media for the first time at 16 — with no prior gradual experience, at an age when parental involvement is already stepping back — enters a less controlled environment later, with less accumulated experience navigating it at lower stakes, and less likelihood of asking for help when something goes wrong.
Several extended the same logic to AI, again without prompting. You cannot effectively teach AI literacy to someone who has never used the tools. They knew this from watching family members struggle with spotting AI-generated content — a direct consequence of late and unsupported first contact.
Circumvention does not require technical sophistication — policy-makers and children are not working from the same assumptions
The implicit assertion in the consultation that circumvention requires technical sophistication was not supported by the experiences of the young people. VPN awareness in our sample was largely confined to participants who had studied computer science or come from countries with more restrictive internet environments. Most needed the term explained.
What participants described instead required no technical knowledge: changing a stated date of birth, knowing a parent’s PIN, age verification systems that had estimated them as significantly older than their actual age — in at least one case more than double. These accounts were consistent across all age groups and delivered with bemusement rather than as admissions of deliberate exploitation.
Democratic concerns
Young people did not know what the consultation was for
This held across every group, including the oldest participants.
Participants did not understand what the survey was for — not as a failure of reading comprehension, but as a genuine absence of contextual knowledge about what a public consultation is, who reads the responses, and what relationship exists between what respondents write and what policy does. Several asked directly: who will see this? What will they do with it?
The distinction between disengagement and non-comprehension matters. Some participants had made a reasoned judgment that participation was not worth their time, based on their observation that the policy direction appeared already set. Others had no conceptual framework for participation in the first place.
Young people knew they weren’t being asked the right questions
Alongside not understanding the consultation’s purpose, participants were aware — and in some cases explicitly frustrated — that the survey wasn’t asking what they actually knew. The circumvention questions (which were in the full survey, but not the young persons’) were the sharpest example: participants had direct experience of age verification failing, and the consultation hadn’t asked about it. Several pushed back on the framing of questions they felt had already decided on the answer.
Young people have already priced in the outcome
Every participant expected a ban. Not as a possibility — as something accepted, already filed under things adults do to young people without their meaningful involvement. The Australian precedent was cited in all but the youngest groups. Almost everyone referred to the consultation as being about “the ban”.
Some raised the democratic dimension directly. Political life is substantially conducted on social media. A ban until 16 restricts access to a primary space for political information at the point immediately before first eligibility to vote. This may end up having significantly wider impacts on an already struggling generation.
Structural observations
What the consultation instrument revealed about itself
Several design problems I documented when the survey launched played out in the sessions in ways directly relevant to interpreting the findings above.
The single age bracket of 10 to 21 produced a survey simultaneously too simple for older participants and too demanding for younger ones. Leading questions shaped what could be answered. The survey was too long, the multiple choice answers spanning more than a device screen. Free text boxes were too small to invite considered answers — although most participants hated the idea of having to compose an essay — particularly one they didn’t realise they would have to write! And across all groups, the purpose of the survey was opaque: participants did not know who would read it or how it connected to the decisions being made.
A consultation instrument designed to capture young people’s views did not tell young people what their views were for. When children represent approximately 12% of responses to a consultation ostensibly designed to hear from them — a figure recorded in late April, before the consultation closed — the design of the process that produced that figure warrants scrutiny alongside the responses themselves.
Methods and limitations
This was a quick and dirty piece of research; in full receipt of ethics approval from UCL’s IoE, but limited by the time constraints. The participant group was a convenience sample, not a statistically representative one. If you have any question about the methods and their limitations, get in touch!
Full consultation response
Our complete response to the Growing Up in the Online World consultation is available here.