Britain’s culture secretary Lisa Nandy says ministers are “looking seriously” at adding Vinted and eBay to the under-16 social media ban set to come into force in March next year. Asked on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg whether the government was looking to ban under-16s from Vinted and eBay, Nandy said: “We are looking seriously at doing so in order to keep children safe.”
The Sunday Times reports ministers are widening the ban to second-hand marketplaces because messaging functions let strangers groom children. Depop and Facebook Marketplace could follow. Ministers announced in June they’d bar under-16s from 10 of the biggest platforms, including Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. YouTube is on the list; YouTube Kids isn’t. Ministers haven’t released the full list, but they say it covers platforms “whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material.” Gaming sites with chat and livestreaming features get restricted too. Roblox won’t be banned outright, but its chat function will be.
Don’t mistake this for a break with platform capital. Ministers aren’t taking on the companies that profit from kids’ attention and data. They’re handing those companies policing jobs and calling it child safety.
Look at what the firms say. eBay already requires all members to be over 18 because listings involve “entering into a contract.” It says it’s “focused on providing a trusted and safe marketplace experience for our millions of customers” and that “While the details of the proposed legislation are not yet clear, we look forward to understanding more and continuing to work constructively with the government.” Vinted aims at over-18s but lets parents or guardians create accounts for children under supervision. It has 17 million UK users. A Vinted spokesperson says direct messaging is “part of how the platform works,” that the company has “zero tolerance for harmful or explicit content,” and that “When we identify inappropriate behaviour, we take action, up to a permanent ban or reporting to the relevant authorities.” Vinted says it welcomes “open dialogue” with ministers and the regulator.
These aren’t rebellious platforms fighting the state. They’re capitalist firms negotiating the rules. They want predictable regulation and no hit to market share. Matthew Sinclair, a senior director at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, which represents tech companies, warns against “scope creep.” He says a restriction on messaging for under-16s “would not stop at social media and would reach into the services families depend on to stay in touch,” and urges ministers to “ensure any new restrictions are proportionate and effective.” That’s the lobby’s line: not youth freedom, but market reach.
The platforms at the centre of this — Meta, Google, Snap, eBay, Vinted’s investors — are US and EU monopolies. They extract data and rent worldwide, and British ministers don’t own them and can’t discipline them. So Westminster does what a junior imperialist state does: it polices their markets at home, writes the age checks, and hands them a compliance regime that smaller rivals can’t afford. Ofcom’s age-verification recommendations build surveillance infrastructure. Police, schools and employers will use that infrastructure long after the child-safety headlines fade. The ban doesn’t challenge platform capital. It gives platform bosses predictable rules and gives the British state new tools to manage its workforce.
The family is a property relation, and its nature is capitalist
The law treats children as property. Not chattel property — Britain abolished that — but a residual proprietorship that survives in custody law, medical consent, schooling, movement and the child’s earnings. Parents decide where a child lives, what a child learns, whether a child gets treatment, who a child sees. Courts enforce it. Police return runaway children to the homes they fled. The state backs the parent’s claim with force, and children have no legal standing to refuse.
The arrangement is patriarchal in origin: the household was the father’s estate, with his wife and children under his command and his name and property passing through his line. Capitalism kept that household in place and built on it. Parents feed, clothe, house and care for children for free, and capital gets the grown workers without paying for any of it. Parents also hand down their class position — the inheritance, the house, the school, the contacts — so the child lands roughly where the parent did. Parents get a sphere of command they call love. The child gets a door that locks from the outside.
Ministers won’t touch any of this, because the family does capital’s unpaid work. So they police the internet instead. Nandy stands up on the BBC and says the government is “looking seriously” at banning kids from Vinted “to keep children safe.” She won’t say a word about the fact that a parent can legally confine a child to a house, pull them out of school, refuse them medical care, and take their wages. That’s the ownership relation. Westminster leaves it alone and calls the marketplace the danger.
Isolation is how abusers keep children
Isolation is the abuser’s best tool. An abuser needs access to the child, privacy, and a child with nowhere to go. Adults who abuse children — parents, carers, priests, coaches, teachers, youth workers — build that access on dependency. They keep the child from other adults. They control the phone, the door, the money, the story. A child who can’t talk to a friend, a teacher, a helpline or a stranger online has no corroboration and no exit. Abuse that lasts years is abuse that stayed hidden.
Some children are isolated by design. Disabled children get segregated schooling and carers who do intimate care, and too often nobody understands or believes their communication. Children in care get moved between placements, and the same council that’s failing them handles their complaints. LGBTQ+ kids get trapped at home with parents who may be the abusers, cut off from the peers who’d believe them. Migrant kids get silence enforced by immigration fear. Kids in tight-knit religious communities get an abuser who holds community authority, where reporting means exile. Poor kids get surveillance instead of support, so families hide problems and children learn early that adults with authority are a threat.
And here’s the twist Nandy won’t name. The platforms are often the only place isolated kids find people who believe them. A queer kid in a hostile home. A disabled kid stuck in a bedroom. A kid in care with no continuity of trusted adult. Vinted’s messaging is “part of how the platform works,” says the company. So is a helpline, a group chat, a friend across the country. Ministers want to cut that line and call it safety. For the kid whose abuser is in the house, protection looks like a locked door.
Second-hand platforms matter to working-class households. Parents sell outgrown clothes and buy cheaper ones. They stretch wages on Vinted and eBay while rent and bills eat them alive. Ministers now propose to bar under-16s from marketplaces their families use to survive the cost-of-living crisis, at the same time as isolating vulnerable children in general.
The ban won’t liberate kids. It gives ministers a headline, platform bosses a compliance regime, and children another lock on the door.
