Policy Blog

Along with children, need to protect all consumers in digital space

The Prime Minister’s proposed ban on social media for under 16s is bold, eye catching and politically revealing. To supporters, it is a long overdue intervention to protect children from platforms that have been allowed to shape young lives with too little accountability. To critics, it looks more like a final roll of the dice from a Prime Minister searching for authority, purpose and perhaps a legacy.

Either way, it should open up a bigger debate. A deeper problem with social media is the collapse of visible authority. Millions of people now receive advice about their bodies, diets, skin, homes, children and safety from strangers whose expertise is often impossible to judge.

Open any platform and there will be confident claims about food ingredients. Warnings about everyday products. Skincare advice from people with no dermatological training. Nutrition guidance dressed up as science. Product safety fears amplified for clicks. Sometimes this content is informed and responsible. Often it is not. The trouble is that consumers are given no simple way to tell the difference.

Poor advice online can push people towards unsafe diets, needless avoidance of ingredients, anxiety about products, rejection of evidence-based guidance and misplaced trust in people with no relevant qualifications. It can make consumers less informed, more anxious, and more vulnerable to confident nonsense.

Brands are held to high standards, and rightly so. They must substantiate claims, follow advertising and consumer protection rules, invest in product safety and employ qualified experts. They cannot simply say whatever they like about health, nutrition, safety or performance. Nor should they be able to.

Yet online commentators can shape consumer behaviour and brand reputation with far less transparency. A product can be trashed in seconds. An ingredient can be demonised overnight. A category can be made to look unsafe by someone whose authority rests on confidence, presentation and follower count rather than expertise.

The result is an uneven information environment. Consumers are left to navigate competing claims without a reliable signal of credibility. Brands that follow the rules can find themselves undermined by voices operating outside comparable standards of evidence, accountability and transparency.

This is where the British Brands Group believes policy should go next, a focus on transparency. Platforms should be required to show clearly whether health, nutrition, dermatology, product safety and similar consumer advice is backed by verified expertise. If a person giving such advice has disclosed relevant qualifications, credentials or professional status, and those have been verified, users should see that. If they have not, users should see that too.

A simple verified expertise signal would not tell people what to think. It would tell them what they are looking at. Consumers do not need a Ministry of Truth, but they do need better tools to assess credibility in an online world where authority can be manufactured with a ring light, a confident voice and a large following.

The Prime Minister’s announcement is a big development, but age restrictions alone will not create a safer digital environment. Policymakers also need to ask what consumers see, who is influencing them, and whether the expertise behind influential advice is visible. Protect children, yes. But protect consumers too. Give people a clear signal when advice is grounded in verified expertise, and when it is not.