Even earlier than France authorised laws banning social media for kids below 15 final January, 13-year-old Benjamin was already questioning what life with out social media would appear like. “If we wish to play soccer, we gained’t be capable to manage it. What is going to we do? Ship letters as a substitute?” he joked in an interview for Le Monde.
His response captured the central problem behind the rising wave of youth social media bans: Eradicating entry is one factor; understanding what these platforms imply in kids’s lives is one other.
Inside weeks of Australia’s related ban, the nation’s eSafety Commissioner reported that platforms had restricted entry to 4.7 million under-16 accounts. Two months later, although, one in five Australian teenagers below 16 was nonetheless utilizing TikTok and Snapchat, in line with a parental-control knowledge firm. However even when all kids’s social media accounts have been to vanish, do such bans truly make kids safer on-line?
Governments are moving ahead with out answering that query as they comply with Australia’s lead. Indonesia’s child-safety framework, which took effect in March, bars kids below 16 from holding accounts on “high-risk” platforms. The U.Okay. authorities has introduced plans to ban social media for under-16s, add default in a single day social media curfews for 16- and 17-year-olds, and lengthen child-safety guidelines to cowl dangerous AI options. And on 17 September, the European Fee proposed the EU KIDS Act, which might bar kids below 13 from social media, set 15 because the EU-wide minimal age for opening an account independently, and require platforms to indicate that their companies are age acceptable and protected by design.
However based mostly on my expertise engaged on Child Online Protection initiatives with the Worldwide Telecommunication Union (ITU) throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific, I do know the bans don’t handle the actual issues. As a substitute, we needs to be paying extra consideration to the systems that generate harm within the first place—particularly, recommender algorithms, engagement-maximizing design, opaque moderation, and extractive knowledge practices.
Account removals should not the identical as on-line baby security
My expertise engaged on defending kids’s on-line security has taught me three principal classes:
First, the general public establishments accountable for baby on-line safety typically lack the workers, funds, or technical capability to implement advanced on-line security insurance policies.
Indonesia is illustrative. A 2026 UNICEF evaluation discovered capability constraints amongst service suppliers, long-term funding uncertainty, and a necessity for specialised personnel. On the native stage, some workers lacked digital expertise, whereas funds constraints left some areas reliant on exterior assist.
Second, many kids, and infrequently their dad and mom, lack the digital literacy and significant considering expertise wanted to navigate on-line dangers safely. My coverage analysis on baby on-line safety in Indonesia, published earlier this year in Digital Society, discovered substantial gaps that account removals can’t restore: Many kids lacked steering on navigating the web safely, and enormous numbers didn’t know how one can report dangerous experiences.
And third, the platforms have restricted unbiased oversight as they determine underage customers, design age-verification techniques, and report their very own compliance. In Indonesia, platforms themselves are accountable for finishing up age verification, whereas the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs oversees compliance. TikTok’s appeals course of for customers flagged as underage, as an illustration, can require a government-issued ID and selfies, which is an issue as a result of it entails gathering the extra private knowledge on an ID card, past that wanted to verify age. Will authorities regulators be sure that TikTok handles that knowledge responsibly?
The privateness paradox of proving age
All ages-based ban creates an engineering downside: How can a platform reliably decide {that a} consumer is sufficiently old, with out intruding on different info? Governments and corporations might use identification paperwork, parental authorization, app-store checks, or facial age estimation. Every strategy has trade-offs amongst accuracy, privateness, accessibility, and resistance to circumvention.
There are additionally technical points. One instrument, facial age estimation, attracts on monumental databases however it’s probabilistic, not actual, as a result of individuals fluctuate a lot. It’s additionally been proven to misclassify each kids and adults.
The problem mustn’t merely be to “confirm age.” It needs to be to show that somebody is above a threshold, with out disclosing their identification, beginning date, or different info third events may use to create a advertising profile. The European Commission’s age-verification blueprint challenges corporations to confirm ages with out gathering all that further info.
Privateness-preserving applied sciences provide promising methods to attain this. Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) can verify that somebody meets an age threshold with out revealing their identification or actual date of beginning. W3C Verifiable Credentials are cryptographically verifiable digital claims that may disclose solely the knowledge wanted, similar to “over 16.” And device-based age signals can permit a cellphone or app retailer to share an age vary with out revealing a consumer’s actual beginning date. However these strategies nonetheless require rigorous safety testing, frequent requirements, unbiased oversight, and clear limits on knowledge retention. In any other case, poorly designed child-safety policies danger creating everlasting identification infrastructures during which companies, not individuals, management private knowledge.
The place connection goes when a platform closes
Blocking entry to a platform redirects some younger individuals, however not at all times the place anticipated. Early anecdotal reviews in Australia pointed to youngsters migrating to smaller, less-regulated platforms like Yope, a sample the Cato Institute flagged as a “whack-a-mole” downside for regulators. However trade knowledge collected two months later discovered no broad-based shift of that sort, apart from a small uptick in WhatsApp use. Many teenagers merely discovered a approach to keep on the banned platforms.
This factors to a deeper hole in present society: the erosion of youth “third places“ bodily areas the place younger individuals have room to socialize and construct identification outdoors dwelling and college. As these areas have diminished, industrial communications platforms have absorbed that position.
For a lot of youngsters, social media workarounds are merely inconvenient. However for remoted, marginalized, disabled, or LGBTQ+ youth who rely upon on-line communities for assist that’s in any other case unavailable, displacement can imply dropping sure sorts of belonging, or having to maneuver to a platform with even weaker oversight.
How you can design safer on-line techniques for kids
If blanket social media bans don’t work, then what’s going to? The platforms have created lots of the situations that governments are actually making an attempt to comprise: engagement-optimized recommenders, intrusive knowledge practices, weak safeguards in opposition to undesirable contact, and options similar to infinite scroll, autoplay, streaks, and chronic notifications.
These design patterns more and more face regulatory scrutiny, together with what’s required below the European Union’s Digital Services Act. A 2026 study from the 5Rights Foundation that tracked kids’s machine use minute by minute discovered that the consumer interfaces form kids’s consideration, sleep, and well-being in actual time.
A extra sturdy response would regulate these interfaces straight, treating children as legitimate users whose privateness, company, and well-being are required protections, not afterthoughts. Which means designing for security from the outset. One instance can be for kids’s apps to have high-privacy defaults, similar to personal accounts and placement sharing switched off for minors. They may even have recommender techniques that specify the primary elements shaping a feed and provides younger customers extra management over personalization. The European Fee has revealed age-appropriate interaction guidelines that restrict unsolicited contact and forestall minors from being added to teams with out consent. Guidelines may additionally prohibit engagement-maximizing features that demand users’ attention, similar to autoplay, infinite scroll, usage streaks, learn receipts, and push notifications, by disabling or limiting them by default.
Governments ought to outline measurable outcomes and fund unbiased analysis, platforms ought to give researchers significant knowledge entry, and engineers ought to audit age-assurance techniques for bias and knowledge leakage. Faculties, dad and mom, and kids themselves want a seat in designing the know-how that’s designed to guard kids.
If policymakers nonetheless resolve to take away an infrastructure for youth connection, they need to provide one thing higher in return. Social media bans might cut back some types of publicity to dangerous content material and could also be justified for specific ages, companies, or dangers. However they’re only one instrument, not a complete substitute for safer design, accountable platforms, digital literacy, institutional capability, and noncommercial digital “third places”—moderated communities, artistic areas, and public-interest platforms designed for youth participation moderately than revenue.
The primary wave of social media restrictions isn’t sufficient to maintain kids protected. Governments are nonetheless measuring what’s best to rely, whereas neglecting harder-to-measure outcomes similar to kids’s entry to protected third locations and meaningful social connection, both online and offline. Till governments can present proof that hurt has truly declined, they are going to hold mistaking account elimination for security.
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