Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has called for a ban on all social media for children under the age of 16 a month after Australia enacted similar rules for its citizens.

The government has not made any moves towards implementing such a policy despite a range of studies – including from the former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy – that link excessive social media use to negative impacts on children’s mental health.

Speaking on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Badenoch said: “What we are seeing is a lot of children spending so many hours a day on platforms that are profiting from their anxiety, from their distraction, and they are actually designed to be addictive.

“So what we want to see is common sense, protection for children and freedom for adults. We want to give parents some understanding that the government understands what they’re going through. So we want to bring in age limits.

“The internet is a wild west, social media in particular. We don’t think children should be on there, and we want the industry to set the direction of travel so that we can start working with them now in order to get the proper solutions in place.”

Australia introduced its ban on social media for children on 10 December, with tech companies facing fines of up to A$49.5m (£25m) if they don’t take “reasonable steps” to stop under-16s from accessing their platforms. The impact of the new law is being watched by countries around the world as concerns increase about the impact that sites such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are having on children.

Today, Meta said it had already blocked about 550,000 accounts in Australia since the ban was implemented, including 330,639 accounts on Instagram, 173,497 on Facebook and 39,916 on Threads. But while the firm has agreed that more needs to be done to protect children, it has resisted the implementation of blanket bans in other countries.

“We call on the Australian government to engage with industry constructively to find a better way forward, such as incentivising all of industry to raise the standard in providing safe, privacy-preserving, age-appropriate experiences online, instead of blanket bans,” Meta said in a blog post.

The firm has argued that blocks should be implemented at an App Store level that prevents underage children from downloading social media apps. However, this would not stop these platforms from being accessed in a browser window, or by sideloading apps on Android devices or jailbroken iPhones.