So apparently, we’ve built an internet where children can’t escape ads telling them their bodies aren’t good enough. Great job, everyone.
Dame Rachel de Souza, England’s children’s commissioner, just dropped a report that should make every parent’s blood boil. Kids aged 13 to 17 are being “bombarded” with advertisements for weight loss injections, diet pills, and even skin-lightening products. You know, the kind of advertising that’s supposedly banned when it comes to children.
The report surveyed 2,000 teenagers and held focus groups to understand what they’re actually seeing online. The results? A relentless stream of content pushing weight loss products, cosmetic procedures like lip fillers, and body-altering products that can sometimes be illegal to sell in the UK. One teenager put it bluntly: beauty content online is “unavoidable.”
When Bans Don’t Actually Ban Anything
Here’s the thing that really gets me. We already have rules against this stuff. The Online Safety Act exists. Ofcom has regulations in place. There are supposed to be protections for children built into how Technology platforms operate.
But clearly, none of it is working. These ads are getting through anyway, and platforms seem more interested in keeping kids engaged than keeping them safe. It’s almost like when your entire business model depends on attention and advertising revenue, you might not be super motivated to crack down on the ads that perform well.
Dr Peter Macaulay from the University of Derby isn’t mincing words either. He says banning social media advertising to children is just a starting point. We need actual platform accountability, better enforcement, and education that helps kids understand the manipulation they’re facing.
The Damage Is Real
Dame Rachel describes these posts as “immensely damaging” to young people’s self-esteem, which feels like an understatement. We’re talking about children in their formative years being told constantly that they need to change, that they need to be thinner, that their skin should be lighter, that they need cosmetic procedures.
This isn’t some abstract concern about screen time. This is targeted marketing designed to exploit insecurities, and it’s reaching kids who are already navigating the nightmare of adolescence.
The children’s commissioner is calling for amendments to the Online Safety Act to include a “clear duty of care” for social media platforms to stop showing these ads to children. She wants changes to Ofcom’s Children’s Code of Practice to explicitly protect kids from body stigma content.
Ofcom claims they already cover this under their “non-designated content” rules. But if that’s true, why are thousands of teenagers still seeing these ads every single day?
What Comes Next
The government says the Online Safety Act was never meant to be the final word on protecting children online. They’ve launched a consultation on “bold measures” that includes potentially banning social media for everyone under 16.
That’s a nuclear option that raises its own questions about enforcement and whether it would even work. But it shows how desperate things have gotten when outright bans start looking reasonable to policymakers.
Dame Rachel put it perfectly: “We cannot continue to accept an online world that profits from children’s insecurities and constantly tells them they need to change or must be better.”
The question is whether anyone with actual power to change things will listen, or if we’ll just get more statements about how seriously everyone takes child safety while the news cycle moves on and nothing fundamentally changes. Because right now, we’ve got regulations that don’t regulate, protections that don’t protect, and an entire generation of kids learning that their worth is measured by how closely they match whatever body type is being sold to them this week.
