By Nate Wolf
The United Kingdom wants to keep kids under 16 off social-media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.
The stock market doesn't care.
Meta Platforms, the Facebook and Instagram parent company, surged 4.8% on Monday. YouTube parent Alphabet jumped 2.7%. Snapchat owner Snap climbed 8.6%.
The U.K.'s proposed ban is designed to limit the time children spend scrolling social media, prevent communications with strangers, and "give kids their childhood back," as Prime Minister Keir Starmer put it. The government will roll out more details on the policy next month.
A spokesperson for TikTok said the company looked forward to collaborating with the U.K. Meanwhile, spokespersons for Meta, YouTube, and Snapchat each argued in separate statements that the ban would push teens to riskier platforms.
"Bans risk isolating teens from online communities and information, and driving them to unregulated alternatives that lack built-in protections and parental controls," the Meta spokesperson said.
The U.K. joins Canada and France on a growing list of countries to propose social-media restrictions for minors after Australia enacted the world's first such ban in December. But Wall Street has become desensitized to the actual or attempted regulation of tech platforms, which have only continued to grow.
"You would think anything that limits the number of users would be serious, right?" Argus Research analyst Joseph Bonner said of Meta. "I haven't seen a real impact either on the stock or on the user acquisition."
It is an open question whether these laws work. In Australia, 61% of children ages 12 to 15 who had social-media accounts before the country's ban reported still having access as of March, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, an online safety and suicide-prevention nonprofit.
Without data showing a big dent in user growth, analysts polled by FactSet expect Meta's daily active users to continue growing through 2028. The same goes for Snap and Reddit, which a source close to the British government noted was included in Australia's ban.
Reddit didn't respond to Barron's request for comment.
Platforms like Instagram and YouTube, which rely on advertising, don't make much money from kids anyway, said Lloyd Walmsley, an analyst at Mizuho. Teenagers don't have the disposable income -- or the easily accessible credit cards -- that advertisers crave.
Instead, Meta and its competitors fight to attract and retain underage users so they will spend money years down the road. It may not be great for Meta if Facebook and Instagram can't win users early, but a blanket ban won't help Meta's rivals either, Walmsley said.
Combine those mitigating factors with a booming artificial-intelligence trade and a history of tech stocks powering through regulatory uncertainty, and you get Monday's non-reaction to the UK's proposal.
"I think the general investor reaction is sort of a shrug when they see a new regulatory risk," Walmsley added.
Litigation is the larger concern. In March, a state court jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Alphabet liable after a woman claimed the addictive design of social-media apps harmed her mental health as a child and exposed her to exploitation by adults. A judge denied the companies' motions for appeal last week.
While the $6 million in damages is small potatoes for two of the world's largest corporations, the March verdict could presage much costlier lawsuits. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is presiding over a trial that combines more than 2,000 cases focused on the harms of social media use by minors. Thousands of other state-level cases are ongoing.
The apocalyptic scenario for investors is that social media goes the way of Big Tobacco, Walmsley said. In the 1990s and 2000s, after a series of minor lawsuits, cigarette makers were ordered to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for harms associated with smoking.
But research on teen social-media usage is still in its infancy. A U.S. Surgeon General advisory in 2023 said social media may have both negative and positive impacts on minors and called for additional research.
The one certainty: Teens love social media. Up to 95% of youths ages 13 to 17 reported using a social-media platform, according to the 2023 advisory, and more than a third reported using it "almost constantly."
Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 15, 2026 17:11 ET (21:11 GMT)
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