UK Police Push for Stricter Online Protections for Minors
UK police leaders are calling for new legislation to block social media, artificial intelligence, and gaming applications that fail to disable high-risk features for individuals under the age of 16. The National Crime Agency (NCA) and the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) have jointly stated that platforms which do not adequately prevent children from being contacted by strangers, receiving recommendations for harmful content, or sharing nude photos should be inaccessible to this age group. This joint appeal comes in response to a government consultation exploring the possibility of banning social media for under-16s, a move that coincides with various platforms pledging to enhance child safety measures.
The government has affirmed its commitment to ensuring technology firms protect children online and stated it backs the regulator Ofcom in taking action against non-compliant companies. A government spokesperson indicated that the administration is considering a range of measures, including age limits, app curfews, and outright bans. “We are going further – consulting on options from age limits and app curfews to outright bans,” the spokesperson added. The government also stated its commitment to making it impossible for children in the UK to take, share, or view nude images, and that it is working at pace to deliver this. However, Graeme Biggar, director general of the NCA, expressed a stark assessment: “our assessment is clear: the online environment in its current form is not safe for children.” He criticized the industry’s response as being “too slow” while the problem escalates, stating, “Enough is enough.”
Identifying and Addressing High-Risk Online Features
Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, chair of the NPCC, described the online sphere as having become “something of a wild west” where legislation and regulation have lagged behind technological advancements. While both crime agencies would prefer children to engage online safely and benefit from its advantages, they argue that the government must legislate to prevent under-16s from accessing any platform or app with features deemed “high-risk.” These features, identified by the NCA and NPCC as enabling “harm at-scale,” include the mass discoverability of children, unrestricted contact from unknown adults, private or encrypted messaging, algorithms promoting harmful and illegal content, nude image sharing or streaming, and weak age verification systems that allow children easy access to adult environments.
Many of these identified features are already addressed within the UK’s Online Safety Act, which mandates compliance from platforms operating in the country, with Ofcom empowered to investigate and penalize breaches. However, the police chiefs advocate for stronger legislative action to enforce minimum age policies more effectively and to mandate device-level controls that would prevent under-18s from capturing, sharing, or streaming nude images or videos. The NCA and NPCC’s proposals fall short of an Australia-style ban on social media for the under-16s, according to Stephens.
Graeme Biggar reported that in 2025, the NCA received 92,000 reports of potential child sexual abuse activity online from tech companies, a number that is growing and becoming more severe. “They involve younger and younger children and we are increasingly seeing children offending as well as being victims,” Biggar stated. He argued that the worsening situation is attributed to tech firms’ failure to prioritize child safety as a core design principle. “This refusal to prioritise safety by design is boosting criminals’ speed and reach,” added Stephens.
Some platforms, such as Instagram and Apple, have introduced technologies aimed at combating a reported rise in sextortion by preventing children from seeing or sending nude images in messages. This is not the first time the government has been urged to strengthen measures to prevent children from taking, seeing, or sharing nude images online; such measures were proposed as part of the government’s violence against women and girls strategy. However, former minister Jess Phillips recently accused the government of being slow to enact these measures. Meanwhile, some charities have raised concerns about end-to-end encrypted messaging, arguing that making messages readable only to the sender and receiver could impede efforts to find and clamp down on child abuse and grooming. Instagram recently disabled this technology for direct messages sent on its platform, while TikTok has informed the BBC it has “no plans” to introduce similar features. Conversely, some experts and campaigners argue that private messaging can be a vital way to preserve online privacy and data security.
