You can't regulate what you can't live without

Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have made themselves too embedded to ban and too profitable to fear real regulation.

There is a non-zero chance that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t even know that the UK proposed to ban Facebook and Instagram for under-16s yesterday.

There is almost 100% certainty that he doesn’t care.

Why should he? Meta’s stock finished 5% up at the Nasdaq’s close last night, pushing its market cap past $1.5 trillion. Yesterday’s 5% move alone added roughly $75 billion to Meta’s value: about 50 times the maximum fine Ofcom could theoretically impose under the Online Safety Act. (Trillion, incidentally, is a word that used to be so rarely deployed that I never needed to shorten it, but we now we live in a world of actual trillionaires and trillion-dollar companies.)

Meta’s share price closed 5% up yesterday off the back of an AI tools announcement and general market happiness over an expected US-Iran deal

Meta has become the rarest of corporate creatures: it trades as best of both worlds. The safety of a utility – like holding British Gas shares in the 1990s – combined with the growth profile of a startup. Its latest quarterly earnings showed year-on-year revenue growth of 33%. That is, to use a technical term, insane, for a company already that size to grow that quickly.

So Meta waves its hands, launches a new AI feature as it did yesterday, and completely overshadows any fleeting existential concerns you might have about a company now facing some kind of ban in multiple Western countries. The market isn’t worried. Neither is Zuckerberg.

And so yesterday’s social media ban is largely theatre.

The ban won’t work. And even if it did, the deeper problem can’t be fixed this way.

Why it won’t work

By chance (sort of) I attended a panel on this very subject last Thursday, hosted under the banner Who Cares About Safety?.

This was not gathering of ban-happy moral panickers. These were serious people making serious arguments: Jake Dubbins, co-founder of the Conscious Advertising Network; Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, CEO of Impress; Andy Burrows, CEO of the Molly Rose Foundation; and Cosima Wiltshire, a policy researcher and university student.

None of them are in favour of this ban. For lots of reasons, not least because the data we’ve already got about bans is not encouraging.

Australia introduced an under-16 social media ban in December 2025, and the UK version, dubbed “Australia plus”, promises to go further.

But, according to a survey of 1,050 children aged 12-15 conducted by YouthInsight for the Molly Rose Foundation in April 2026, 61% of children who held accounts on restricted platforms before the ban still had access afterwards. By platform: 53% of previous TikTok users, 53% of YouTube users, 52% of Instagram users. All still on, six months after a ban designed to remove them.

This isn’t a story about crafty teenagers getting round the ban with virtual private networks (VPNs). It’s simpler and more damning than that.

Between 60-64% of continuing users across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat reported that the platform took no action to remove or deactivate their existing account. Australia’s eSafety Commission hasn’t issued a single fine for non-compliance.

Not one. As Kirkconnell-Kawana put it: “All the evidence coming out of Australia is that 60% of children are evading the ban, and of the 40% that are compliant, they are seeing no positive benefits.”

The platforms simply didn’t bother. And why would they? Social media companies face fines of up to A$49.5m (about £25m) for serious or repeated breaches. Yesterday’s 5% move in Meta’s share price added $75 billion to its market cap. A £25m fine isn’t a deterrent; it’s a rounding error.

The scale of what a ban is supposed to achieve makes this worse. Ofcom data published in May 2026 shows a 13-14 year old currently spends nearly 16 hours a week – over two hours a day – on just three platforms: YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. For 15-year-olds the figure rises to over 22 hours a week. The Australian evidence suggests the ban releases almost none of those hours. The habits remain. The platforms remain. The harm remains.

Why it can’t work

The panel’s second argument cut deeper. A ban tells platforms who can use their services, but it says nothing about how those services are designed.

So a 16-year-old who graduates into legal use on their birthday encounters exactly the same infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic feeds and notification architecture that caused the problem in the first place. The teen is not protected; they’re just given a year’s reprieve before being let into what Dubbins called “the addiction economy” – a hosepipe of never-ending, algorithmically curated content bait designed to keep you on the platform all day and every day.

Andy Burrows put the design problem plainly: “The reality is that we’ve had over a decade of social media causing harm to children and young people as a result of commercial decisions and business models translating into design choices that have had safeguarding as a second-tier concern, if that.”

His charity, is named after 14-year-old Molly (Rose) Russell, who killed herself in 2017. In the six months leading up to her death, Molly was served more than 2,000 pieces of harmful content on Instagram: self-harm material, influencer content glamourising and normalising intense depression.

“Eight years later, if you go onto Instagram, if you go onto TikTok, that content is still there, and it is still there on steroids,” he said.

The Online Safety Act has been law for three years. But for Burrows, the Act was so watered down it “wasn’t fit for purpose” and “not commensurate to the size of some of the largest, most cash-rich companies in the world.”

He was blunt about what happened to Labour’s stated intentions in opposition: “We have seen two years of this government being captured by the tech bros.”

The reason, he suggested, is that Starmer’s growth agenda has convinced ministers that placing safeguarding obligations on these companies will cost the UK data centres up the M1.

“Prime Minister Keir Starmer host Council of Nations and Regions” by Number 10, CC BY 2.0

Because Meta and Google are not just the companies behind Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. They are online media infrastructure on which businesses depend. They are frontier AI companies which are promising, whether you believe them or not, to deliver a step change in how humans and machines organise the world and, it is hoped, improve living standards.

None of which is good news for avoiding the next Molly Russell catastrophe.

Why the whole argument is on the platforms’ terms

Here is what nobody in that room said, and what yesterday’s announcement didn’t address.

Every proposed solution for ‘dealing with social’ media – the ban, the Online Safety Act, safety by design principles – is a request. Not a demand with real consequences, but a meek request to very large, very rich, and very legally resourced American companies.

“Oh please will you start behaving now?”

You can’t open a restaurant in this country without passing a health and safety inspection. You don’t get a fine afterwards if your kitchen turns out to be contaminated.

Or cars, which kill 3,200 people every day on average worldwide. No one talks about banning cars despite the many millions that have died or been injured on roads. Nor does anyone politely ask Ford if they would please put seatbelts in their cars or face a fine of up to 10% of their global turnover.

Of course, social media regulation has never worked like that. Platforms launch, cause harm, get asked to stop, litigate, lobby, wait it out.

Just imagine the consequences of the UK banning Meta entirely, or, to exhaust the restaurant analogy, force it to close and only reopen once it cleans up its act. Just for starters, such a move would likely trigger a trade dispute with the US, face judicial review under the Human Rights Act, and alienate the 35 million UK adults on Facebook. This isn’t China; becoming the kind of surveillance state that could actually enforce a blanket ban is not an option any government here (thankfully) will choose.

But there is one mechanism in yesterday’s announcement that is structurally different: the requirement that platforms use ID document scans or face-scanning technology to verify users’ ages. If implemented as a genuine prerequisite – you cannot operate in the UK market until Ofcom has approved your age assurance system – that could be a meaningful step forward for making a under-16s ban workable. For the first time, compliance would come before operation, not after harm.

Whether the government actually builds it that way is another matter entirely. Ofcom has been asked to conduct a “rapid study” of what effective age assurance even means. The details arrive next month, but I won’t be holding my breath.

But here’s what the announcement does reveal, whether Starmer intended it or not: it is an implicit acknowledgment that Meta cannot be controlled at the root. The ban is not regulation. It is a workaround; an attempt to protect a subset of users from a product that the government has quietly accepted it cannot meaningfully constrain.

Meta’s lawyers already know this. So does its share price.

Note: I moderated another panel at this Advertising Who Cares? event about the future of quality media content, which I’ll aim to cover on these pages soon. Thanks to Brian Jacobs for organising this event and please, if you care about the future of media and advertising, consider supporting this important initiative’s work.

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PS: the high-quality media revolution

I’ve been extremely busy of late, so this is the first essay I’ve been able to write for several weeks. As well as a surge in my usual consulting and report-writing commitments, I made my SXSW presenting debut and am shortly due to an announce an exciting new journalism project that I’ll be supporting.

The pause did allow me to reset my expectations of what Ad-verse Reactions should offer going forward. While I’ve always tried to offer depth and perspective about the issues facing media and advertising, keeping to a weekly schedule does bring the pressure of having ‘a hot take’, which is exactly what I don’t want to produce here. There are enough of those and there’ll even more to come, thanks to AI chatbots and their amazing ability to polish verbal diarrhoea.

The uncomfortable truth about social media being seen as ‘essential’, as I argue today, is because it’s cultural. Many of us are conditioned to fill every waking hour with some form of swiping and scrolling on smartphones and, frankly, traditional media has also played its part in ‘attention hacking’ as publications and broadcasters moved online.

If we want humans to remain productive and happy in an age where so much can be done by computers, we all need to be more mindful about producing stuff that matters instead of producing stuff at speed. That is what hits Big Tech hardest: that demand from consumers and advertisers finally begins to dwindle as we realise we just don’t need this low-quality stuff in our lives anymore.

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Welcome to Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes: a journalist who has spent over a decade picking apart how media, marketing, and content actually work – not how they pretend to.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges, and provocations I bring to my clients.

I also run oomph. – a narrative consultancy for media and advertising leaders whose story hasn’t kept pace with their business. I help agencies, media owners, and senior marketers sharpen their positioning, craft industry-leading narratives, and turn complex issues into content that actually moves people.

📩 omaroakesmedia@gmail.com 🔗 linkedin.com/in/omaroakes