Keir Starmer has not yet given his full backing to a social media ban for under-16s. But on Monday the prime minister announced a series of measures to restrict the harms ministers believe online platforms are causing to children who use them.

“As a dad of two teenagers, I know the challenges and the worries that parents face making sure their kids are safe online,” the prime minister said in a statement.

Here are the three concrete actions the government announced on Monday.

Making it quicker to enact a social media ban

Starmer has announced a consultation into setting a minimum age for social media.

Before that consultation takes place, however, ministers will write a clause into the existing children’s wellbeing and schools bill that will enable them to enforce a ban quickly, if that’s what the consultation recommends.

These so-called Henry VIII powers allow the government to use secondary legislation to enforce an age limit, rather than writing an entirely new bill. This would speed up the process of enforcing a ban, but critics worry that it could undermine parliament’s ability to scrutinise the action.

The government also said on Monday that the consultation would cover measures such as restricting infinite scrolling for under-16s and setting age limits on virtual private networks, which can be used to circumvent other online restrictions.

Downing Street said MPs and peers would be given a vote on whatever action was taken as a result of the consultation.

A spokesperson for the prime minister could not say, however, whether either house would be given a full debate on the measures and the chance to amend them.

“Both houses will have to approve the secondary legislation which will deliver the policies,” No 10 said.

“Doing this now is about taking proactive steps through the right parliamentary channels to be ready to start acting on the outcomes of the consultation as quickly as possible.”

Extending online safety rules to AI chatbots

Last month Keir Starmer picked a fight with Elon Musk and arguably won.

The prime minister led calls for the X owner to stop his company’s Grok AI tool from creating fake sexualised images of real people, something X eventually said it would do in the UK.

Ministers argued at the time that the Online Safety Act gave regulators the power to take action against X. Ofcom, however, admitted that while it could take action against chatbots that were being used to search for material already on the internet, it lacked the power to do anything about artificially generated content.

The Online Safety Act requires social media companies to take steps to stop children accessing harmful content such as pornography or material related to self-harm. Now ministers want chatbots to fall under the same rules.

“These AI chatbots are forming friendships with children that can take them into all sorts of places they shouldn’t be going,” Starmer told the BBC on Monday.

Forcing social media companies to keep children’s data after death

In April 2022, 14-year-old Jools Sweeney was found dead in his bedroom. His mother, Ellen Roome, believes his death was the result of a viral TikTok challenge that went wrong, but she has been unable to access Jools’s social media data, which might prove her right.

Since then, Roome has campaigned for a “Jools’s law” that would require online platforms to preserve a child’s data as soon as their death is reported. The government will now amend the crime and policing bill to make sure this happens within five days of a death being reported and the data is made accessible to a coroner or Ofcom.