Seventeen million people in Britain use Vinted. Most of them are buying and selling unwanted jumpers and trainers, and few would call the app social media. Ministers may be about to do exactly that.
Asked on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg whether under-16s could be barred from Vinted and eBay, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said the government was "looking seriously at doing so" to keep children safe. That falls well short of an announcement. But it followed a Sunday Times report that the planned under-16s ban on Vinted and eBay was already being drawn up, and Nandy did nothing to wave it away.
Why a resale site counts
The worry, as the Sunday Times reported, is the messaging tools built into these marketplaces, which can let strangers contact children and, in the paper's account, groom them. Depop and Facebook Marketplace were said to be in line for the same treatment. The government has confirmed none of it.
There is an awkward fact at the centre of this. Both Vinted and eBay already say their users must be 18 or over, and eBay's own rules give the reason: listings involve entering a contract. So a ban on under-16s would, in a narrow sense, restate a rule the companies claim to enforce. Whether it changes anything depends on how many children are on the platforms regardless, and nobody has published a figure. The BBC has said it approached both firms for comment.
The wider policy helps explain the reach. Ministers said in June that children would be kept off 10 of the biggest platforms from March next year, among them Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, plus YouTube (though not the YouTube Kids version). The full list hasn't been released. The stated test is whether a service exists to enable social interaction and lets users post material. Features count too: livestreaming, or anything that lets strangers reach a child, can pull a service into scope. Roblox, the most popular gaming site among British eight to 12-year-olds, won't be banned outright, but its chat function will be restricted.
Seen through that definition, a clothes-swapping app with a message inbox is hardly a stretch.
The enforcement question
Australia brought in a similar ban last year, and many children there have reportedly found ways around it. The British government says it wants a tougher approach. Last month, Ofcom set out its recommendations on the most effective ways of checking which users are over 16, and the argument has since shifted from whether to ban to how anyone could police it.
That is where a marketplace extension gets harder, not easier. Social networks are built around identity and have long collected age signals. A resale app is adults selling to other adults, and verification there touches payments, postage and parents who sometimes sell a child's outgrown clothes. Would a teenager helping a parent list a coat be breaking the rules? Ministers haven't said. Somewhere, presumably, a coat is waiting on the answer.
There is also a commercial angle. Vinted has grown fast, and eBay has been a fixture of online resale for years. Both would face new compliance duties, and possibly costs, over a risk they say they already manage by setting an age floor.
The thing to watch is the published list. Until it appears, Nandy's phrase "looking seriously" is the whole of the policy. If Vinted and eBay are named, the ban will have stretched from social networks to any site where a stranger can send a child a message. That is a much wider net, and the regulator will have to decide how to police it.