The gross hypocrisy of teen social-media bans

While the UK government flip-flops over the implementation of an ‘Australian style’ social-media ban for under-16s, actual Australian teenagers continue to post on TikTok, send memes on Instagram and keep streaks alive on Snapchat.

The ban failed almost as soon as it began. On the very day in December 2025 that it was supposed to have taken effect, hordes of under-16s trolled PM Anthony Albanese’s X account. ‘I’m still here’, they posted, and ‘wait until I can vote’. It was spectacularly embarrassing for the government – though very amusing for the rest of us.

During a lengthy propaganda campaign, which cost the Australian taxpayer $76.1million, bureaucrats insisted children needed to be kept safe from harmful material such as pornography, self-harm content and body-image pressures. This is hardly a controversial position to take – most of us would agree.

The problem here is that the Australian government’s apparent concern about protecting children collapses completely under scrutiny. As many have pointed out, far more explicit corners of the internet such as Pornhub and OnlyFans remain only partially policed, inconsistently age-gated, and easily evaded with a virtual private network (VPN). Children also continue to inhabit the gaming-platform, Roblox, which was not on the government’s verboten list, despite the grooming risks there being well documented.

But the hypocrisy extends beyond inconsistent bans. Far more damning is the fact that the very same bureaucrats who recently discovered the notion of childhood innocence have, for years, been exposing schoolchildren to sexualised and ideological material over which parents have little meaningful control. Such material has been disguised within benign-sounding programmes such as Australia’s ‘Respectful Relationships Education’ or the UK’s ‘Relationships and Sex Education’ (RSE). Yet on closer inspection, both are awash with gender theory, queer theory, intersectional feminism, toxic-masculinity workshops and third-party classroom activities so explicit they would make Bonnie Blue blush.

In terms of its embrace of radical gender ideology, Australia has long outstripped the UK. This is largely because Australian parents are handing over their two-year-olds to kindergarten teachers who have been ordered by the government to explore children’s gender identity. Teachers have been instructed that early childhood is a critical time for children to begin understanding gender, and that kindergartens need to be, as one state government website puts it, ‘safe spaces where LGBTQI+ children and families feel welcomed, honoured and supported’. They have also been warned against ‘heteronormative ways of working and ensuring rainbow families are meaningfully included and experience a sense of belonging’.

The UK’s RSE programme was made compulsory for primary and secondary school students in 2020 by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government. While the Department for Education’s statutory guidance for schools talks a great deal about respect, inclusion and age-appropriate content, the programme has simply acted as a gateway for nefarious organisations to indoctrinate children. While charity Mermaids – which claims that ‘our gender is decided by other people when we’re born, based on the way our body looks’ – gives out chest binders for girls to try out in their spare time, Stonewall tells kids in its LGBTQ+ glossary that ‘G’ is for Gender Identity:

‘This is the gender that someone feels they are. This might be the same as the gender they were given as a baby, but it might not. They might feel like they are a different gender, or they might not feel like a boy or a girl.’

At this point, the only thing children might feel is confusion and anxiety.

RSE takes us to the Wild West of sex education. This was made apparent in the Cass Review, the landmark independent review of gender-identity services for children in England, which found a great deal of emphasis is being placed on ‘non-normative’ sex. As one resource laments, ‘penis-in-vagina sex can be a bit meh, or rubbish, for many couples’. At every opportunity, it seems, heterosexual sex is either actively denigrated or struggling to keep up with an endless parade of more ‘exciting’ alternatives. In one lesson plan from an award-winning independent school, 12- and 13-year-olds are asked what they ‘know / think / feel’ about the kind of sex had by ‘heteronormative couples’ and ‘non-heteronormative couples’.

Though official guidance makes no mention of pornography or masturbation, the Cass review found that both have become fixtures of RSE. Resources included ‘Masturbation: A Hands-On Guide’, and material from an organisation called Split Banana, including ‘A Simple Guide to Great Sex-Ed: How to Talk About Porn’.

How do we reconcile the vast chasm between the government’s feverish attempts to ban children from social media on the grounds of safety, with its continued insistence on exposing those same children to explicit and controversial sexual content in the classroom? One can only conclude that this was never about protecting kids from harm at all. It was about control. The state wants to be the one doing the indoctrinating – to shut parents out of their children’s formation while it assumes ever greater authority with ever less transparency. This uneasy arrangement now sits at the heart of our educational crisis.

Bella d’Abrera is the Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation at the Institute of Public Affairs, and the author of Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying our Civilisation (Wyborn Press, 2026).