Bradford Social Media Trial Puts Teen Time Limits to the Test

Thousands of teenagers in Bradford are taking part in a social media trial that will limit how long they can spend on apps each day. The study, called the IRL Trial, is co-led by Professor Amy Orben of the University of Cambridge and Dr Dan Lewer of the Born in Bradford programme, according to the University of Cambridge. The full social media trial runs for six weeks this autumn, and the researchers plan to finish their analysis by the middle of summer 2027.

The timing matters because governments are moving faster than the evidence. Australia brought in a social media ban for children under 16 in December, and British ministers have been debating similar age limits. Whether a daily cap does teenagers any good is the question the social media trial was built to answer. Orben told Cambridge that scientists agree children need better protection online, and that research on which interventions actually work is still missing. The social media trial is meant to fill that gap with a controlled test of time limits and a nighttime curfew, rather than an outright ban.

How the social media trial works

Schools in Bradford recruited students from three secondary year groups for the social media trial. A research app installed on each phone tracks use across platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. Messaging services such as WhatsApp stay outside the limits because families rely on them for everyday contact, the Cambridge announcement said.

Half of the school year groups were randomly assigned to the restricted group. Their combined social media use is capped at one hour a day, with access blocked between 9pm and 7am. The other year groups keep using apps as usual while the app records their activity, giving researchers a comparison group drawn from the same schools and age range. Randomising by year group means a whole friendship circle faces the same rules, so one student is not cut off while friends stay online late.

Questionnaires and interviews sit alongside the app data. Researchers will measure changes in anxiety, sleep quality and time spent with friends and family. They will also track wellbeing, body image, school absences and bullying. A separate line of work will look closely at students who already live with heightened anxiety, to see whether limits help them more or less than their classmates. Earlier work from Orben's group found that adolescents with a mental health condition spend an average of fifty minutes extra on social media on a typical day.

Teenagers helped shape the social media trial

The design came out of discussions with Bradford teenagers, who told the team that social media pulls them away from offline relationships and hobbies. Born in Bradford, which follows the lives of more than sixty thousand people in the city, also ran focus groups with local teenagers in February 2026 for a policy briefing on social media restrictions. Those sessions covered proposed limits for younger teenagers, alternatives such as curfews, and how any rules could be enforced in practice.

The focus groups gave the researchers a warning worth hearing. Many teenagers doubted that technology companies would build robust age or time systems, and they listed ways restrictions could be bypassed. That scepticism is one reason the social media trial uses a dedicated research app and measures actual use instead of asking students to estimate their screen time later. Self reported habits are unreliable, and policy built on them can miss what teenagers really do at night or between lessons.

Local habits underline the scale of the change being tested. Research from the Born in Bradford team suggests teenagers as young as 13 in the city use social media apps for three hours a day on average. Cutting that to a single hour is a large reduction, and the trial will show whether students fill the gap with sleep and physical activity or simply shift to television, games and browsers. How teenagers spend their phones' free hours is already shifting, as a recent report on screen time and twin research on this site described.

What the results could change

The programme is funded by the Wellcome Trust and is expected to last two years, with results submitted to academic publishers. If limits improve sleep and lower anxiety, the findings would give ministers a tested option that stops short of a ban. If the restricted group shows no benefit, or reports feeling cut off from friends, that result would also matter for the British debate, where a ban for younger teenagers is due to be considered for next spring. Either way, the social media trial gives lawmakers measured outcomes instead of competing claims.

Orben also sits on the academic advisory group helping the Australian eSafety Commissioner evaluate that country's ban, so evidence from Bradford will be read alongside the Australian experience. The two approaches differ in an important way. A ban tries to remove younger teenagers from platforms altogether, while the Bradford social media trial tests whether a smaller daily allowance and a night curfew can reduce harm while keeping accounts open. Readers following how platforms shape daily habits can also see our coverage of social search and the feed.

For the students involved, the study period will feel simpler than the policy argument around them. Some will watch an app lock them out in the evening, and others will carry on as before. Their combined records, gathered with consent and compared across year groups, will form the first controlled evidence of its kind on social media limits for healthy teenagers, according to the research team.