Charlotte Salomon: The Conservatives are right to defend childhood online and draw the line at 16

Charlotte Salomon has worked in political communications, and was a Conservative candidate at the 2024 Election she is now studying for the bar.

We have built a comforting story around the idea of “digital natives”.

Teenagers, we’re told, are born into technology. They understand it instinctively. They are quicker, sharper, more adaptable than the adults trying to supervise them. And so we reassure ourselves that parents can manage it at home, that the state should keep out, that young people will figure it out.

It is an attractive argument. Some say it’s a Conservative one. I disagree.

Being a digital native does not mean being digitally protected. It does not mean understanding how data is harvested, how algorithms profile behaviour, or how consent operates in law.

Fluency is not comprehension. And confidence is not consent.

That is where this debate really starts.

Kemi Badenoch is right to argue that under-16s should not be on social media. It is no surprise that public support is growing. But beneath the surface of this debate lies something deeper that we cannot afford to ignore. This is not just about screen time, culture, or whether teenagers spend too many hours indoors. It is about data. It is about law. And it is about whether we are prepared to keep pretending that children are giving “informed consent” to systems they do not, and cannot, truly understand.

When Parliament set the digital age of consent at 13 under the Data Protection Act 2018, it chose the lowest age permitted under Article 8 of the UK GDPR. Thirteen. From that birthday onwards, a child can legally consent to the processing of their personal data by online services without parental involvement.

At the time, this was presented as pragmatic. Children were already online. The law needed to reflect reality. But the digital world of 2018 is not the digital world of 2026. And even then, we were asking the wrong question.

Under UK GDPR, consent must be “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous.” That is not a soft standard. It requires an individual to understand what data is collected, how it is used, who it is shared with, and what rights they retain.

Now ask yourself honestly: when was the last time you read a privacy policy in full? (No judgment). Consent fatigue is real, and all of us have succumbed to it at one time or another.

Now picture a 13-year-old inside an ecosystem engineered around infinite scroll, dopamine spikes, dark patterns, loot boxes, manufactured FOMO and relentless peer validation.

If we are going to talk seriously about social media and the online world, we have to understand the wider architecture of data-driven design. These platforms are not neutral public squares. They are commercial systems engineered to maximise engagement, harvest behavioural data and refine algorithmic targeting.

Children do not just use these platforms. They are manipulated to generate value for them.

They provide data they knowingly share: names, photos, messages. They emit data traces they never see: location metadata, device fingerprints, patterns of behaviour. And most significantly, they become the subject of inferred data created through algorithmic profiling. That is where the real power lies. Platforms do not simply observe behaviour. They model it. They predict it. They shape it. They monetize it.

A 13-year-old cannot meaningfully assess what it means for an AI system to construct a long-term psychological profile about them, one that influences what content they see, which products they are shown, which insecurities are targeted and which emotional triggers are most effective.

That is not informed consent. It is behavioural modelling at scale, wrapped in a tick box.

And here is where we find a deeper inconsistency in our laws.

Under contract law, minors lack full capacity. We recognise that a child should not be bound into complex commercial arrangements because they may not understand the implications.

In medical law, we go further still. We do not rely purely on age. We assess maturity under the principle of Gillick competence. We test whether there is real understanding.

Yet online, we allow a 13-year-old to bind themselves to opaque data processing agreements longer than most mortgage documents.

Why is digital autonomy treated as less serious than medical autonomy?

The uncomfortable answer is economic. Data is profitable. Children are valuable markets. Capture attention early and you shape habits that can last a lifetime. And the most dangerous part is that it is largely invisible. Data extraction does not look like harm. Algorithms do not arrive with warning labels. There is no obvious moment of damage, no visible bruise.

But after a while, the consequences begin to surface. Rising anxiety. Broken sleep. Thinning attention spans. Children who feel constantly watched, compared and judged. The NHS has opened clinics for gaming disorders. Schools report collapsing concentration. Parents describe children who simply cannot disengage.

We are getting something wrong.

It is to the Conservatives’ credit that this is now being confronted directly. Kemi Badenoch’s position recognises something simple and profoundly conservative: childhood is a protected category in British law. We draw lines around it. We set boundaries. We accept that some freedoms require maturity. So, where is everyone else?

Yes, some will call this paternalistic. But we are paternalistic in every serious area of childhood. We regulate. We set age limits. We draw lines. We do it because we understand developmental reality. We should do it here because we understand technological reality too.

The Conservative pledge to ban social media for under-16s is not radical. It is responsible. It is not nanny state politics. It is proportionate, measured, and in step with international peers. And it restores coherence to a legal framework that currently rests on a polite fiction.

A serious country protects its children. Not just in the physical world, but in the digital one too.

If we cannot draw a boundary around childhood online, then we have quietly decided that profit matters more than protecting children.

That is not a conservative position. And it is not one we should accept.