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Technology secretary Liz Kendall announced that from next spring, 16- and 17-year-olds in the UK will have a midnight–6am block on certain social-media apps switched on by default, alongside default deactivation of autoplay and personalised content feeds — all overridable, the latter in a couple of clicks. The apps covered have not been named. The measure extends last month’s under-16 ban, which named Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, and the government declined to restrict VPNs, citing its own finding that 7–10% of children use them to bypass age checks and concerns about free speech.

The evidence and the policy were built to different specifications. DSIT commissioned Savanta in May to test three restriction models; curfews came out most enforceable, and the sleep benefit was strongest and most consistent when Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Reddit were blocked — from 9pm to 7am, with YouTube, Teams, Google Classroom and messaging left open. What ships is four hours shorter, starts at midnight, names no apps, and can be switched off. The reported gains — earlier bedtimes, better concentration, less stress, and cumulative in participants’ own accounts — were observed under a ten-hour window that captured the evening. The policy captures the hours after it.

With no app list, no platform can scope the work. The build differs by an order of magnitude depending on whether “certain apps” means the six Savanta tested, the six named in the under-16 ban, or something wider — and those lists are not identical. Reddit sits in the trial set and not in the ban set. Platforms carry that ambiguity until the naming lands next spring, which caps what any of them can put into product plans now; the default-off treatment of autoplay and personalised feeds is a design change with a known shape, but no defined perimeter. The cost is deferred, not avoided.

Gradlines’ position is that the gap between trial conditions and shipped conditions makes underperformance against the sleep outcomes the likeliest result, and that this is what matters commercially. A default measured at ten hours and delivered at six, with an override, is unlikely to reproduce the effects it was sold on. When the evaluation arrives, thin results will read as evidence that defaults are insufficient rather than that this default was mistimed — which is the argument that carries a statutory version. The compliance question for platforms is not next spring’s build. It is whether next spring’s build becomes the baseline for a mandatory one.

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