UAE social media ban alone won't fully protect under-15s: experts

What happened

Child-safety experts have told The National that simply banning young people from social media is unlikely to keep them safe unless it sits within a broader, co-ordinated online protection strategy. The comments follow confirmation that the UAE plans to bar under-15s from using social media platforms from June 2027, joining a growing list of countries introducing age-based restrictions on youth access to social platforms.

Wayne Denner, co-founder of Beat the Cyber Bully — an initiative working across the UK, Ireland and UAE to educate parents and children on digital safety — said the patchwork of national approaches undermines effectiveness. He noted that legislation typically covers only specific apps, leaving gaps that young users can exploit by migrating to unregulated platforms, and argued that policy needs "joined-up thinking" rather than isolated bans.

Experts quoted in the report said a more effective model would combine restrictions with structured education for both children and parents on safe online behaviour, rather than relying on access bans as a standalone measure.

Why it matters

This is fundamentally a service-design and behavioral-economics story: a ban is a blunt, one-time intervention, while sustained behaviour change — safer browsing habits, parental literacy, platform-level safeguards — requires ongoing reinforcement and system design. Policymakers and platform operators focused only on access controls risk a false sense of security if the underlying behaviours and gaps in digital literacy go unaddressed.

For governments and organisations building child-safety or digital-wellbeing frameworks, the lesson extends beyond age gates: effective protection design needs to account for substitution effects (young people moving to unregulated apps), the role of parents as co-users of the system, and the need for education to be embedded alongside enforcement, not treated as a separate track.

The Renascence take

Bans are easy to legislate and hard to enforce; behaviour change is harder to legislate but far more durable. The experts' critique points to a familiar service-design failure: addressing a symptom (access) while leaving the underlying journey — how children discover, use and migrate between platforms — unmanaged.

Treating a ban as the finish line is a classic behavioural-design trap: it optimises for visible compliance, not for the actual outcome of child safety. Any jurisdiction serious about this needs to design the full journey — platform rules, parental literacy, school-based education and ongoing nudges — because young people will always find the path of least resistance around a single control point. Operators and regulators alike should treat the 2027 deadline as a design brief, not a deadline to simply switch something off.