A ban on under-16s using social media will not make the people who target children disappear. It will make them move. That was the uncomfortable truth sitting beneath an otherwise encouraging panel discussion at this week's Labour Party Conference, hosted by the Internet Watch Foundation, where ministers, safeguarding experts and young people's advocates tried to reckon with a policy that is both necessary and, by its own architect's admission, blunt.
The scale of the problem, as laid out by IWF Chief Executive Kerry Smith, is sobering. Child sexual abuse material is becoming harder to find on the open web, with offenders instead leaving clues in encrypted spaces that point towards hidden content. AI-generated abuse imagery is growing quickly and growing more severe. Reports of children being sexually extorted are running at roughly double last year's level for the same period, and the pattern she described, relentless harassment with fresh payment demands arriving every half hour, is as much a financial crime as a safeguarding one. For families trying to understand how exposed their own devices and networks are, basic digital hygiene matters more than ever; even something as ordinary as learning how to configure a VPN on Windows 11 can be part of a wider conversation about protecting a household's online footprint, though no single tool substitutes for proper regulation and enforcement.
The Problem With Banning Platforms, Not Behaviour
Displacement is one of the oldest and most reliable findings in crime prevention. Close off one avenue for a motivated offender and they do not stop; they redirect towards a different platform, a different method, a different target. Online, that means children removed from mainstream social media will still be reachable through gaming platforms, messaging apps and smaller services that remain largely invisible to regulators and under-resourced to respond. The risk is not that harm disappears. The risk is that it becomes harder to see while continuing at the same rate.
Ian Murray, the Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Online Safety, did not dispute this. He acknowledged that displacement sits at the heart of the debate over whether platforms should have an "off ramp" toward safer design rather than a flat ban, and admitted that failing to plan for it could leave the UK worse off than before. His stated ambition, to regulate "outcomes rather than inputs" and remain platform-agnostic, points toward a more durable approach. Grooming follows a recognisable sequence, building trust, isolating a target, testing boundaries, creating obligation, then escalating, regardless of whether the end goal is sexual imagery, extortion payments, or recruitment into crime. Detecting that pattern of behaviour, rather than chasing named apps, is the only approach likely to hold once offenders relocate.
Regulators Working in Silos
The IWF's analysts routinely find abuse material hosted alongside links to self-harm content, extreme violence and terrorism, yet the legal and regulatory response remains fragmented across different bodies. Offenders do not organise themselves around the boundaries of Ofcom, financial regulators or law enforcement, and as long as those agencies examine only their own slice of the problem, the gaps between them will be exactly where displacement occurs. A joined-up approach, treating a grooming conversation and the payment it eventually produces as symptoms of the same offence, would close far more of those gaps than any single ban.
What Good Regulation Still Needs
Government setting a clear target and letting the safety technology sector build toward it, as happened with age assurance, has already shown it can move an industry quickly. The regulations due by December, and the under-16 ban that follows, are a meaningful start. But they will only work if displacement is designed for from the outset, if rules target behaviour and function rather than brand names, and if online safety and financial crime enforcement finally start talking to each other. A ban tells us where children should not be. It says nothing about where they will end up next, or who might already be waiting there.