Who Gets Caught in the Age Gate? The UK's Under-16 Social Media Ban and the Risk to Sex Workers

The idea of banning social media for children under 16 is, on the surface, relatively straightforward. Whether this is the correct thing to do is not the debate of the article; instead, this article draws attention to a wider issue of online age assurance. Namely, to prevent children from accessing social media, platforms must first establish who is and who is not a child.

In June 2026, the UK Government announced that social media platforms would be prohibited from offering their services to children under 16. The measures are expected to be introduced before Parliament by the end of the year and to come into force in spring 2027.

The policy follows the model introduced in Australia and sits within a much broader regulatory programme concerned with protecting children from harmful content, exploitative contact and platform design that may be damaging to their wellbeing. (gov.uk) (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/use-of-age-assurance-report-2026)

The protection of children online is, of course, a legitimate and important regulatory objective. However, the more difficult question is what happens when the regulation of children begins to restructure the online environment for adults as well.

For sex workers in particular, this is not an abstract concern.

Age assurance not only affects children

The UK's proposed social media restrictions do not appear in isolation. They form part of a wider shift towards the use of age assurance across the internet.

Under the Online Safety Act, age-assurance systems are already being used across services hosting pornography and other forms of content considered harmful to children. Ofcom has described the current rollout of age checks as unprecedented in scale, with many services now required to use what it calls “highly effective age assurance” to determine whether users are over 18. (ofcom.org.uk)

The proposed under-16 social media restrictions extend that logic considerably further. Whilst age verification has traditionally been associated with explicitly adult spaces, it is increasingly becoming relevant to ordinary participation in mainstream digital platforms.

That distinction is important because age assurance does not simply identify children. To determine that someone is under 16, a platform must also establish that everyone else is not.

The mechanisms through which this can be done vary. They may include facial age estimation, identity documentation, mobile network information, financial information, or digital identity services. However, irrespective of the method used, the underlying principle remains the same: access to online spaces becomes increasingly dependent upon a platform being able to make some form of assessment about the identity or age of its users.

For many adults, this may amount to little more than inconvenience. For others, however, the implications are substantially more significant.

For sex workers, the ability to maintain separation between different identities can be an important part of personal and occupational safety. A person may deliberately separate their legal identity, family life and employment from their sex-work identity. They may use different names, different accounts and carefully controlled information in order to prevent clients, family members, employers or strangers from connecting those separate parts of their lives.

Therefore, the expansion of age-assurance infrastructure is not simply a technical question about whether a person can prove that they are old enough to use a particular service. It is also a question about privacy, anonymity and the extent to which users are increasingly expected to disclose, or allow platforms to infer, information about themselves in order to participate online.

Sex workers are already disproportionately affected by platform moderation

This concern has to be understood within the wider context of how sex workers already experience social media moderation.

Are and Briggs' research with 123 creators who had been deplatformed from Instagram and TikTok, including those producing sexual or sex-work-related content, found significant financial and emotional consequences where users relied on these platforms for visibility, professional networks and income. (journals.sagepub.com)

For sex workers, social media can also provide access to community, peer support and safety information. Therefore, account removal, reduced visibility and deplatforming can have consequences extending well beyond the removal of individual posts.

The concern is that, where platforms face increasing regulatory pressure around sexual content and children's access, they may adopt increasingly cautious moderation practices. From a platform's perspective, removing too much may be safer than removing too little. For sex workers, however, that caution can mean reduced visibility, income and access to important online spaces.

Australia has already recognised the risk

Importantly, this concern is not entirely speculative.

Australia's eSafety Commissioner has already considered the relationship between age assurance, online pornography and sex work as part of its work on age-verification regulation.

During consultations, sex workers and adult-industry stakeholders raised concerns that measures introduced in the name of protecting young people could disproportionately affect lawful sex work. Participants reported being removed from platforms despite complying with existing terms of service, receiving limited warning when rules changed and having few meaningful opportunities to challenge moderation decisions. (esafety.gov.au)

The regulator subsequently acknowledged that age-assurance measures should not unnecessarily restrict safe online spaces for sex workers. It also recognised potential consequences including sex workers being pushed towards less safe platforms, experiencing disproportionate compliance costs and facing restrictions on their ability to advertise. (esafety.gov.au)

This is particularly relevant in the UK context because it demonstrates that the relationship between child-protection regulation and sex-worker censorship is not simply a hypothetical slippery-slope argument.

The UK Government is not introducing an under-16 social media ban in order to regulate sex work. However, that does not mean sex workers will remain unaffected by the regulatory infrastructure required to enforce it.

The more important question is what happens once regulatory obligations reach private platforms.

Governments create legal duties. Platforms then decide how those duties will be operationalised, how much risk they are prepared to tolerate and which users or forms of content are most likely to create regulatory exposure.

Those decisions do not always reproduce the law precisely.

We have seen this form of over-compliance before

The United States provides one of the clearest examples of what can happen when platforms become legally risk-averse around sexual content.

In 2018, the United States introduced FOSTA-SESTA, legislation designed to address sex trafficking by expanding the circumstances in which online platforms could potentially face liability.

The legislation is materially different from the UK's proposed social media restrictions and should not be treated as a direct comparison. However, the response of platforms following its introduction is instructive.

Research has documented widespread deplatforming of sex workers and broader restrictions on sexual speech following the reforms. Carolyn Bronstein has described this as the “deplatforming of sexual speech”, whilst Davisson and Alati similarly connect the legislative changes with the closure of sex-worker forums, account removals and increased shadowbanning. (tandfonline.com) (journals.sagepub.com)

The significance of this example lies not in the legislation itself but in how platforms responded to regulatory risk.

A law does not need to explicitly prohibit lawful sex work in order to make it harder for sex workers to exist online. If platforms begin to associate certain kinds of users, content or sexual expression with legal, reputational or financial risk, they may impose restrictions considerably broader than those required by law.

This makes discussions about censorship more complicated.

The state may not directly remove a sex worker's account. Instead, regulation may alter the incentives facing a private company, which then concludes that restricting or removing certain users is the safest course of action.

The outcome for the individual affected, however, may be much the same.

The question of effectiveness

There is also a more fundamental issue of proportionality.

Australia has already introduced the form of under-16 social media restriction that the UK Government is now seeking to emulate, and early research raises important questions about its effectiveness.

A 2026 study published in The BMJ followed Australian adolescents after the country's minimum-age restrictions came into force. More than 85 per cent of participants under the age of 16 continued to report using social media platforms covered by the legislation three months later.

Some continued to use their own accounts, whilst others reported methods of circumvention including fake accounts and private browsing. At that early stage, the researchers found limited evidence of a substantial reduction in social media use attributable to the age threshold itself. (bmj.com)

These findings should be treated cautiously. The research is still early and cannot establish that Australia's policy will ultimately prove ineffective.

However, it raises an important question about proportionality.

If young people are able to circumvent restrictions relatively easily, whilst adults become increasingly accustomed to age verification, identity checks or other forms of online assessment, then the wider costs of the policy become increasingly relevant.

This is particularly important for communities who already experience disproportionate moderation or who rely heavily on anonymity and pseudonymity.

Protection should not create new forms of harm

None of this requires us to choose between protecting children and protecting sex workers.

That is not, and should not become, the debate.

Children deserve protection from exploitation, harmful content and digital environments deliberately designed to maximise engagement. Sex workers also deserve access to privacy, safety, community and lawful participation in online spaces without being automatically treated as a regulatory risk.

The difficulty lies in ensuring that one form of protection does not inadvertently undermine another.

There is a longer history to this tension. Sex-work scholarship has repeatedly examined the way in which ideas of protection can justify increasingly interventionist forms of regulation. Joanna Phoenix's work on youth prostitution policy, for example, demonstrates how the way policymakers construct a social problem can shape which forms of intervention subsequently appear necessary or legitimate. (journals.sagepub.com)

This does not mean that protection itself is problematic. However, it does mean that protective rationales should still be subject to scrutiny.

The same principle applies to the regulation of online spaces.

The protection of children should not remove the need to consider proportionality, privacy, anonymity or the wider effects of the systems introduced in order to achieve that protection.

The UK's proposed under-16 social media ban is ostensibly about children. However, the infrastructure required to enforce it will inevitably be used on adults as well, and the way platforms respond to that infrastructure is likely to extend far beyond the users the legislation is primarily designed to regulate.

Sex workers have already experienced what happens when platforms are encouraged to treat sexual content, sexual commerce and sexual identities as forms of regulatory risk.

Their experiences therefore provide a useful warning as the UK moves towards a more heavily age-gated internet.

The central question is not whether children deserve protection online. They do.

The more difficult question is whether that protection can be achieved without allowing somebody else's privacy, safety and livelihood to become collateral damage.