UK weighs banning under-16s from reselling apps over sexualised messages

Ministers are considering banning under-16s from online marketplaces including Depop, eBay and Facebook Marketplace, following mounting evidence that private messaging functions on reselling apps have become a new frontline in child exploitation. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said on Sunday the government was "looking seriously" at expanding the under-16s social media ban to include online marketplaces. According to the Sunday Times, the regulations were sent for cabinet signoff this week, and Nandy is expected to present them to parliament in December.

The policy intervention follows reports from young sellers — some of them minors at the time — of sexualised messages, requests for indecent photos in exchange for money or gifts, and images of children scraped from the platforms and turned into AI-generated nudes without their consent. The Children's Society has warned that some young users of resale sites are increasingly being targeted this way.

The stakes are substantial. Reselling apps have become a routine way for teenagers and young adults to earn money from secondhand clothes, and any ban would cut off that income for a group that often has few alternatives. At the same time, Ofcom (the UK communications watchdog) has found that 15% of eight to 14-year-olds use Vinted each month — despite the platform's stated minimum age of 18 — and another report suggests some children can bypass age checks on restricted online services altogether.

What are sellers actually experiencing?

In June, Hannah* listed her seven-year-old daughter's pink swimming costume on Vinted for £1, hoping other parents would buy it. Instead, a user with a male handle messaged her: "So a little girl wore this yh [yeah]?" When Hannah confirmed, the user asked: "Naked?"

After replying "What do you think?", Hannah blocked the user and reported the incident to Vinted. She described the exchange as "disgusting" and "disturbing". Her case is one of many innocuous listings of children's and young people's secondhand clothes that attract sexualised comments through direct messaging.

Young women have posted on TikTok and Reddit about similar interactions with buyers, including requests that items come with used underwear, and unsolicited sexual comments about their appearance.

How did AI make this worse?

Lucy* started reselling clothes on Depop at 15. In one exchange, a user asked to raise the price of an item she had listed for about £10. "The person had changed it to £30 and said: 'If you include your pants I'll pay more'," she said. "That made me feel like, oh my God, awful."

She then discovered that images of her taken when she was under 18 — posted to advertise her clothes — had been scraped from Depop and were circulating on Reddit. "These pictures are actually still being resurfaced on these Reddit pages, which is quite frustrating," she said. "It would be me at 17 trying to sell a bikini, and these men have screenshotted these images … It's not just me, it's hundreds of other girls."

About two years ago, Lucy found users on Discord had stolen her old Vinted and Depop photos and manipulated them with AI to create deepfakes (synthetic images made by AI, here depicting her nude). "It's deplorable that people think it's acceptable to take people's images and make them into AI porn – I felt really, really upset," she said.

Her case illustrates a structural problem: images uploaded once for a commercial listing can be copied, redistributed and synthesised indefinitely, and the harm does not stop when the seller turns 18. Lucy, now 25, says she has continued to find sexualised images of herself online. The risk, in her words, "did not end at 18".

What would the ban actually change?

The reported proposal would extend the logic of the under-16s social media ban to online marketplaces, requiring strict age verification on Depop, eBay and Facebook Marketplace. Vinted, which already sets a minimum age of 18, would have to join the other platforms in gating access with verification features rather than relying on self-declared dates of birth.

Whether verification will work is an open question. Vinted says minors can access the site only under the supervision of adult account holders, yet Ofcom's data shows 15% of eight to 14-year-olds using the platform monthly. A separate report found some children can bypass checks on age-restricted services. A ban premised on verification inherits every weakness of that verification.

Who opposes the ban — and why?

Some child safety campaigners fear a sweeping ban could exclude children from the internet entirely rather than make it safer. Karen Garland, head of policy at the Marie Collins Foundation — a charity supporting victims of technology-assisted child sexual exploitation — said: "We need to make spaces for children and young people that are safer by design. And so, in some ways, extending a ban into other spaces may not be the best route overall."

Lucy is similarly conflicted. "It's a real shame because there are probably very young girls that maybe are from different backgrounds … that maybe really need that money," she said. She nonetheless acknowledged there could be "extremely dangerous" consequences to selling clothes on Vinted, based on her own experience.

What do the platforms say?

A Vinted spokesperson said: "We have zero tolerance for harmful or explicit content and use a combination of dedicated moderation teams and detection tools to spot and remove activity that breaks our rules. When we identify inappropriate behaviour, we take action, up to a permanent ban or reporting to the relevant authorities."

An eBay spokesperson said: "We have clear policies and safeguards to protect our community, including encouraging people to keep conversations on eBay, avoid sharing personal contact details and report any suspicious or inappropriate behaviour. Where we or our customers identify policy violations, we take appropriate action."

Depop said: "Using someone's images without their permission is a violation of our terms of service, which explicitly prohibits users from using or sharing another user's content without their consent, whether on Depop or elsewhere. We take the safety of our community extremely seriously and we have robust policies, controls and processes in place to protect our users."

The statements address enforcement after the fact. None of the three companies addressed the specific gap Ofcom's data exposes: children are on these platforms in significant numbers despite stated age limits, and neither moderation teams nor detection tools appear to have prevented scraped images and deepfakes from circulating on third-party sites for years.

The regulations now await cabinet signoff and Nandy's December presentation to parliament. If passed, the first test will be whether age verification on marketplaces performs better than it has on the services children already bypass.

*Names have been changed.