The John Smith Centre’s UK Youth Poll 2026 shows young people occupy an online media landscape they don’t fully trust. Social media is here to stay, and we’re better off fixing it than binning it.
The changing landscapes of media, information and politics have been discussed exhaustively – the new media landscape is digital, and the Westminster duopoly is breaking down. Young people contribute greatly to these changes; 61.5% of UK Youth Poll 2026 respondents regularly use social media as a source of political information, while Labour and the Conservatives hold a combined 23.1% of voting intention, against 37.4% between Reform and the Greens.
Media and information are key to civic engagement. When both change form so rapidly, it’s in the public interest to examine them.
Support for an Australia-style social media ban for under-16s has only shifted minorly between the 2025 and 2026 Youth Polls, from 67% to 62%. Among the prospective ban’s justifications is protection from online mis- and disinformation.
Earlier this week, following a major consultation into young people’s “digital wellbeing,” and the ban’s rejection in early March, the Prime Minister confirmed plans to implement the ban by the end of the year. In the UK Youth Poll 2026, young people showed the nuance these salient discussions are missing.
Firstly, young people don’t simply agree with a government ban on principle. When asked who should be primarily responsible for ensuring social media spaces are safe, even those who supported the proposed ban were completely split:
Across the entire sample, the response was a similar split of 35.3/31/33.7%.
Presented with a binary choice, almost 2/3 of young people said “yes” to the proposed ban. The broader question, meanwhile, indicates that despite demand for external action around social media, direct political prevention isn’t necessarily the first choice.
Secondly, young people are not blindly trusting of information they consume online. While young people overwhelmingly populate the digital media landscape, they’re more scrutinous of online political information than often credited for. YouTube led among social media, with 34% of respondents considering it either “trustworthy” or “very trustworthy” for political information, but Instagram, TikTok and X ranged 20-24%.
In comparison, 36.3% of respondents considered print media trustworthy. 39.2% trusted television, 42.4% trusted radio, and nearly half maintained trust in the BBC for political information. These findings confirm that, for young people, digital media spaces aren’t replacing traditional sources, but being engaged with alongside them, with different degrees of investment and scrutiny. Children and young people’s experiences navigating the digital world should make them key participants in designing its future. These findings show how a ban, designed without this participation, misunderstands how they consume information.
Finally, young people tell us the prospective ban would never have worked in the first place. As one focus group respondent put it:
“Bans are being implemented by people who have no idea how smart kids are on social media, how they can get around these things. I think banning something outright doesn’t stop people from using it.”
The precedent is there – as shown by the massive uptick in VPN downloads last year when adult websites began requiring UK-based users verify their age, implementing age limits can actually lead to less control. In Australia, where the under-16s social media ban was implemented in December 2025, polling found 61% of 12-15-year-olds who previously used social media continued to do so after the ban. Had the ban been passed in the UK, we could expect comparable outcomes.
So, how should the demand that harmful social media usage is externally prevented be addressed? Rather than attempting to restrict social media usage, the Youth Poll’s findings point towards making young people’s most used sources more reliable.
Young people don’t see the internet as a monolith. They discriminate to decide which sources and platforms they trust – evidenced by their trust of online newspapers, podcasts and YouTube content over short-form sources like TikTok. The problems of online political information would be better addressed, and the issues of a blanket ban avoided, by requiring that companies are transparent about and liable for what they promote on their platforms.
Firstly, the demand for intervention by both government and companies would be met, reducing risks without compromising social media’s benefits.
Secondly, scepticism around online information would be met with appropriate design changes – rather than information being promoted by secretive algorithms, users would be empowered and better informed about what content they engage with.
Finally, such a policy would see broader success. Counterintuitive as it may seem, young users would be less incentivised to side-step rules which are less restrictive. Furthermore, by abandoning the specific target on young people, easy access to reliable information would be improved across demographics.
Isaac McCrory is a final year undergraduate student of Sociology and Politics at the University of Glasgow. He is interested in media sociology, youth studies, and populist politics.
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