But the real question is where young people go next?
After the UK government confirmed social media will be blocked for under-16s by Spring 2027, grassroots sports platform Spond has backed the historic social media ban. The company has challenged one common criticism of the policy: that the ban risks pushing young people onto unsecure, encrypted messaging networks such as WhatsApp or Telegram, where parental oversight is non-existent and grooming or cyberbullying is harder to detect.
With more than 1.5 million monthly active users in the UK, Spond sees the challenge close up.
Why the Social Media Ban Is the Right Call
Spond’s position is direct. The social media ban is justified. Feeds engineered to hold a child’s attention have done real harm, and nine in 10 parents want them gone. But removing something leaves a void, and young people do not stop wanting to connect.
The Risk of Pushing Young People Onto Unregulated Platforms
The danger that major platforms keep raising, and which Australia’s early experience appears to confirm, is that a social media ban simply relocates young people to less regulated, less visible spaces such as Signal or Telegram, both of which are encrypted messaging platforms.
“Taking young people away from social media is the right call. The question nobody is really answering is what fills the gap,” says Charlene Kemp, UK Country Lead at Spond. “If the answer is unregulated group chats and platforms with no oversight, we have simply moved young people from one risk to another. The opportunity here is to point that energy somewhere built for the opposite purpose: organising real life, in the open, where parents can see everything.”
That is the position Spond is presenting to both the government and individual organisations following the social media ban announcement. The void it leaves should be filled by tools designed to coordinate real world activity rather than capture attention, and those tools should raise the safeguarding bar, not lower it. Spond argues this is entirely achievable, because its own platform and others are already doing it.
How Spond Approaches Safeguarding
Safeguarding means ensuring everyone, especially young people and vulnerable adults, can play sports and stay active in a completely safe environment. Protecting these groups isn’t just a policy. It is everyone’s responsibility.
On Spond, group leads can switch the settings for direct messaging on or off, to either allow messaging in a safe, transparent space, or to prevent direct messaging to junior members under 18. Every young person is linked to a verified guardian who receives all communication relating to them, and event invitations, availability and payments all route through that responsible adult.
Spond allows young people to stay connected and safe with parental visibility as well as allowing contact to be restricted. It also allows young people to communicate with their friends in a safe space where parents have visibility, an approach that becomes more relevant once the social media ban narrows their other options.
Traceability Sets Spond Apart from Group Chats
The platform’s traceability is what separates it from the group chats some clubs make do with today. Every message is logged and remains visible to administrators, creating a permanent, auditable record. Whether a group is managed directly by the club or by an individual coach, the common feature is that oversight does not disappear when a leader moves on. By contrast, a private WhatsApp thread only ever surfaces a safeguarding concern once something has already gone wrong.
Tools like Spond already sit outside the social media ban by design, because they are not social media and carry no feed, no algorithm and no open network. The bigger point, Spond argues, is that they represent the model the post-ban world should actively encourage.
What Should Replace Social Media for Young People
“This is a chance to reset what young people’s digital lives look like, not just subtract from them,” Charlene adds. “We succeed when young people log off and turn up: on the pitch, in the gym, in their community. The win is not more screen time, it’s a safer connection that leads somewhere real. Spond enables people to connect digitally, so they can disconnect in the real world.”
What Spond Is Asking the Government and Ofcom to Do
As implementation of the social media ban is finalised, Spond is urging the government and Ofcom to continue to recognise the difference between platforms that profit from young people’s attention and tools that help them step away from the screen, and to encourage the latter as part of a safer digital culture for young people.
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