UKIE's Nick Poole: "The social media ban will change the rules of engagement"

Nick Poole is the CEO of UKIE.

Video games are not social media. Let's start there.

The core purpose of social platforms is to capture attention, mostly through the algorithmic push of content. Their aim is not necessarily fun, learning or self-discovery. It is to keep your easily-distracted eyeballs focused on their platform for as long as possible.

That’s not what games are about. We create authored, interactive experiences and gameplay loops that are all about the fun – that sense of play, discovery or even pure distraction that comes from spending time with a great game.

Yes, there are some experiences that push at the boundaries of this distinction – on both sides. But those are the edge cases, not the essence of games as a medium. 

Keir Starmer’s announcement of a full social media ban for under-16s on the 15th June was hailed as a “landmark move to give children their childhoods back” – a comment which received mixed reviews from the young people in question. 

Parental concerns

You might well ask why the announcement followed so hot on the heels of the Online Safety Act, which came into full force in August 2025. The answer is that concerns about the amount of time children are spending on social platforms consistently ranked first in polling of parents – effectively pushing lawmakers to take more direct action.

So what does this mean for video games and interactive entertainment? That’s a complicated question.

The announcement itself proposes that ‘user-to-user platforms’ should be completely age-restricted for under-16s. This would include household-name platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X but not messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.

Several features are identified as ‘high risk’, particularly stranger communications and livestreaming. The aim is that access to these features for under-16s will be restricted and that they’ll be ‘off by default’ for 16 and 17 year-olds. 

Thanks to some very hard work from the UKIE policy team in the weeks leading up to the announcement, the Government has formally recognised that video games are a distinct kind of digital product from social media.

But that doesn’t mean these restrictions won’t also apply to games. For example, the Government explicitly mentioned ‘online services like gaming’ as being in-scope for the restrictions on communications features for under-16s.

Essentially then, while the ban recognises that games are different from social media, some of the provisions on specific features (mainly communications from strangers) will impact on how users access and play games.

The question of implementation

All of this, it’s worth noting, hinges on someone, somewhere finding an approach to age assurance (effectively, verifying that someone is the age they say they are) that the Government deems to be ‘highly effective’. 

This has been a sticking-point with similar bans around the world – in Australia, data from the Molly Rose Foundation suggests that 61% of children aged 12 to 15 that had a social media account still had it after the introduction of their ban.

We’re waiting for guidance from Ofcom in October on which forms of age assurance can reliably identify whether a user is under 16. There’ll be an interesting moment when parents realise that the front-runner in this race, at the moment, involves allowing their little darlings to upload full scans of their faces to the world wide web.

But beyond the questions of definition and the arguments over effectiveness lies a much simpler point. Everyone I have spoken to across this industry shares the ambition to keep kids safe. We are digital toymakers, storytellers and creatives – we know that children are growing up in a massively connected world which presents both potential risks and immense opportunities.

The Government is understandably taking a ‘harms-based’ view on all this. But there is also a positive opportunity for us to step up as an industry to demonstrate how digital businesses can continue to operate responsibly and with due care for our players.

If we come at this in the right way, we can show how the digital literacy, empathy, community and agency that people find in games help prepare young people to thrive in the complex and messy online world. 

Rules of engagement

In this, we also have to be clear that good digital citizenship and online safety begin at home. I spent the best part of a decade campaigning on media literacy and I know from first-hand experience that parenting – the modelling of good digital behaviours from informed and engaged parents or carers - matters more than anything in the digital lives of children.

The social media ban will change the rules of engagement and I think it will help to set the guardrails around appropriate use of social media. There will be some spillover into games - my UKIE colleagues are actively working with the Department for Science, Industry and Technology (DSIT) to look at the cross-over with in-game functionalities.

Barring a (frankly unlikely) change in political will, we’ll know the shape of the legislation by Christmas, with the full legislation coming into force in Spring 2027. 

But whatever the state of the law, the reality is that parents and Government are asking us a question. They want to know what role we intend to play in the lives of children and young people. 

I hope we take this not as a challenge, but an opportunity to demonstrate that this incredible medium of video games and interactive entertainment is a force for good.