Midnight to 6am: the voluntary social media curfew for older teens

A month after announcing the under-16 ban, the government has turned to the age group just above it. Under plans set out on 15 July, 16- and 17-year-olds will find social media apps locked between midnight and 6am by default, with videos that play one after another and continually personalised feeds also switched off by default.

The key word is default. Unlike the under-16 ban, none of this is compulsory: the government says older teens can still change their own settings if they wish. Online safety minister Kanishka Narayan's argument for the soft approach, as reported by NBC News: when some platforms introduced similar defaults in October, more than 90% of teenagers told the government they had kept them.

Critics have made the obvious point that a curfew you can disable isn't much of a curfew. The counter-argument is about friction rather than force. Most people, teenagers included, never change defaults. The government's evidence so far is a pilot with more than 300 teenagers and parents, whose families reported that the curfews quickly became routine and helped sleep and concentration. Whether that holds at national scale will be measurable within months of the rollout.

For families, the practical read: the settings arrive on the platforms' side, nothing is needed from you, and the under-16 ban timeline is unchanged (regulations before Christmas, enforcement from spring 2027). The ban hub has the full timeline.