When conversations about social media bans reach the halls of Westminster, they are framed as a straightforward safeguarding issue. One that can be solved with broad language and all-encompassing solutions for 2026’s youth.
Politicians seem buoyed by bans elsewhere, including in Australia, Indian states and now Spain. That's despite increasing warnings of the harm they can cause.
Zoom out from the cities where these decisions are being made, out to the Welsh valleys, and you start to see a different picture. Even for today’s Queer Welsh youth, the first time we see someone like ourselves is usually not in our school or our village, but online.
More and more front-facing influencers are gay men in full faces of makeup, trans men and women sharing lifestyle content, queer elders educating younger generations, and everything in between. Social media is an undeniably significant part of most children’s lives. But for closeted queer teens in rural areas, accessibility to role models can be more than that - it can be a lifeline that lets them know they belong.
Campaigners have been clear that restricting access to social media, though framed as a way to protect young people, risks cutting off something vital for LGBTQIA+ youth. The debate often centres on screen time and addiction, but rarely pauses to ask what, and who, might be lost in the process.
Growing up in rural Wales shapes your experience of queerness in ways that can be difficult to explain to those raised in cities. The valleys, to my eight-year-old self, centred around rugby matches every weekend and a culture of groups of boys playing in the streets.
I am blessed with a supportive family, but queer ‘community’ was hard to find in my teen years. It wasn’t until I went to college in Cardiff and stayed behind for four hours every Thursday after classes to join the Welsh Ballroom Scene that I was able to experience a queer community in person.
Before I found that queer community, I built one online. Bonding through Instagram and YouTube comment sections, I spoke about discovering RuPaul’s Drag Race, niche horror shows and other things that I could never have mentioned to those around me in rural Wales.
The Children’s Commissioner for Wales has previously highlighted how geography and poverty intersect to shape young people’s access to support, and that disparity extends to LGBTQIA+ provision. When offline options are scarce, digital communities can be life-saving.
Forty years ago, isolation for queer youth would have been much more common. During the era of Section 28 in the late 1980s and 1990s, local authorities were prohibited from “promoting” homosexuality, creating a chilling effect in schools and libraries across the UK.
This legislation silenced discussion of LGBTQIA+ identities and left many young people without accurate information or visible role models.
For a queer teenager in a rural part of the UK at that time, connection required physical proximity, and where that proximity did not exist, neither did support. The lack of community, including online, meant many queer young people faced isolation, with no access to support.
Today’s online spaces collapse that distance. Queer young people can easily follow queer creators through TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. That visibility matters, particularly when your immediate surroundings offer little reflection of who you are becoming.
Findings show that LGBTQ+ young people who feel safe and understood in online spaces report better mental health outcomes than those who do not.
According to Trevor Project’s 2023 US National Survey on the mental health of LGBTQ Young People, 41% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in that year, but those who had access to affirming spaces, including online communities, reported better outcomes.
UK research paints a parallel picture. Stonewall’s School Report has consistently found that LGBTQ+ pupils experience higher rates of bullying and lower feelings of belonging at school, conditions that can drive young people to seek connection elsewhere.
None of this suggests that social media is without harm. Research has documented rising levels of online hate speech, including anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric. But blanket social media bans risk ignoring the uneven way harm and benefit are distributed, and seem to ignore the growing warnings of how they'll erode the privacy of adults too.
Adult content restrictions are paving the way for more censorship for the queer community.
Young people do not all use social media in the same way. José González Vargas’ story shows how powerful online sites can be for impacting queer youth’s lives: “Time zones didn’t matter, nor usually did labels such as gay, bi, cis, non-binary or trans. We all remained there because we needed it.”
If we are serious about protecting young people, we need to approach social media policy with that nuance in mind. Safeguarding matters, but so does access. For queer young people growing up far from a visible community, a phone and access to community online is a lifeline.
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