A healthy influence? Children’s exposure to appearance-changing products online

For the past five years as Children’s Commissioner I have been speaking to children about the online world and its influence on childhood. It became clear to me very early on in the role that children today do not distinguish between ‘being online’ and ‘being offline’ in the way that adults do, or even in the way that previous generations of children did. The two worlds exist simultaneously, through smartphones.

The debate around what children are seeing via these powerful little devices has never been louder. School leaders have told me of their deep concerns for children’s online safety – despite most of them already restricting or banning phones at school. Parents talk to me about feeling overwhelmed by the risks of being online, compounded with the inevitability of their child needing access to a phone.

Children speak to me frankly about the dark things they are witnessing: girls avoiding even being online for fear of having someone fake a naked image of them, large numbers seeing pornography online by age 11, or teenagers being so resigned to bad things happening to them online that they don’t tell their parents.

It is within this context of heightened awareness and political debate that this report lands, one which adds another dark angle to the commentary: the extent to which influences from the online world are affecting children’s thoughts and feelings about themselves.

This report seeks to quantify children’s exposure to products that are designed to change their appearance, from weight-loss injections to creams that claim to lighten skin colour to Botox and muscle-boosters. Children tell me – and they have told tech companies directly in my presence – that they have been targeted by advertising for the kind of products tech companies would insist were blocked from their social media feeds, or even those that should by law be banned from being shown to them.

The findings in this report are deeply concerning, not just the kind of products being promoted to children but the way in which advertising content preys on their fragile sense of self-esteem. As one 17-year-old told my team: “This [product] will fix your eyelashes, this will fix your lips, this will fix your nose, this will fix your hair, this will fix your nails…”

Is it any surprise that, in my Big Ambition survey in 2024, only 40% of girls and 60% of boys told me they were happy with how they looked?

Shortly before Christmas last year, the Australian government made the bold and ambitious step of introducing a ban on access to nine major social media sites for children under 16. The world was watching closely: now the UK government in Westminster has opened the door towards a similar ban, through a consultation that will address some of the crucial questions about how to enforce a similar policy when social media is already so intrinsic to children’s lives.

This report, and the voices of the young people within, adds real value to that debate. It illustrates the limitations of any kind of ‘ban’: 41% of children told me they have seen advertising for prescription-only weight loss drugs like Ozempic or Mounjaro, despite advertising of these kinds of products being illegal in the UK.

It is not enough to simply want to ban something. Introducing a ban is not an immediate guarantee that children are safer. In many ways, deciding to impose a ban is the easy bit. The hard work is making sure a ban is workable, well-understood, easily enforced and has teeth. When companies are found to be breaking the rules, sanctions must be significant enough to create a genuine disincentive.

I believe we are a long way off that yet.

Furthermore, the views of older children represented in this report prove that removing access to social media for under 16s only addresses one part of the problem. It means that we cannot take our foot off the gas when it comes to creating an online world that is safer by design, where children of every age are protected from harm by default, not by chance.

The Online Safety Act must continue to evolve in strength and scope, even as the conversation turns to a ban on social media. Both are urgent – we cannot afford one without the other. In the words of one of my 17-year-old Youth Ambassadors, articulating why she believes a ban on social media is necessary: “Parents can teach children and restrict things, but they can’t teach them not to see their body image in a different way. They can tell them, but it might not get across.”

Childhood is short and precious, and too many children are growing up with skewed, unhappy beliefs about themselves. We have the opportunity to stop this, to create a generation of children who are allowed to just be children, without the shame, anxiety, or even confusion created by content they stumble across online.