Before we ban kids from social media completely, here's what we should try first

A push to raise the minimum age for social media and other online services is gaining momentum, beginning with Australia, which recently banned those under 16 from creating social media accounts.

Proponents present compelling studies on the harms of youth social media use and point to evidence that the threat of age restrictions is already pushing some companies to make their products safer. Critics counter that requiring adults to submit to intrusive age checks creates privacy harms and security risks, that blocking young people from these services infringes on their right to participate in public life, and that it pushes them toward riskier alternatives, such as Telegram.

This debate speaks to our professional experiences at New York University's Center for Business and Human Rights, and a 15-year career as a Google executive. We are also both parents, so the outcome will affect our families directly. We recognize that minimum-age requirements will continue to advance if platforms fail to comply with targeted design requirements. We propose two positive, solution-oriented initiatives that we urge policymakers to adopt before they consider implementing minimum-age restrictions.

Jonathan Bellack

Jonathan Bellack is the author of Platformocracy, a free weekly newsletter that advocates for democratic governance of online platforms. He is in his fourth decade as an Internet professional, including 15 years as a senior product leader in ads and online safety at Google, and was the founding director of the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Jonathan has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from the New York University Stern School of Business.

Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat

Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat is a policy advisor on technology and law at the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. Her work focuses on governance of online gaming, social media, encrypted messaging, and 3D immersive ("metaverse") technologies. Prior to joining the Center, Mariana taught at the University of Chicago Law School and consulted for several international human rights organizations. She has a J.D. from Yale University and a B.A. from Princeton University.

Enforce targeted, proportionate restrictions

Creating safe online spaces without being overly intrusive is difficult. Human rights law provides a methodology for assessing government actions that restrict individual rights for any legitimate reason: Does the restriction achieve its purpose, or could a lesser restriction work?

Applied here, a government would have to show that switching off or altering harmful platform features or expanding parental controls would not suffice and that nothing short of removing children from the service would work. Answering that question requires specifying which harm is at issue, since each calls for a different fix. There were 21.3 million suspected online child sexual exploitation incidents reported to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2025. Such exploitation may be enabled by children having publicly discoverable profiles, recommendation systems that surface those profiles, and frictionless messaging between children and adults.

Cyberbullying ‪—‬ which, according to one 2025 study, had affected almost one-third of American teens in the past 30 days ‪—‬ may be facilitated by pseudonymous accounts and group chats that allow adding someone without permission. Keeping children from accessing some of these features and keeping adult strangers out of child-focused spaces, like Roblox, would address both harms without placing unnecessary restrictions on children.

Age-inappropriate content is harder to define. Adult-content filters in school have been critiqued for treating health-related content as if it were pornographic. In addition, potentially sensitive material does not affect all children equally. Parents and caregivers, rather than regulators, may be better at making the calls about specific categories to restrict.

The compulsive use of social media emerges from systems designed for growth and engagement optimization — features like infinite scroll, autoplay, variable reward notifications, and algorithmic feeds. These exploitative design patterns affect every user, not just children, and they exist in other online services, like gaming platforms. The best response may be to restrict these features across the board or, as the New York SAFE for Kids Act does, to turn them off by default unless adults opt in.

Examining each harm separately suggests the risk lies not in the platforms but in particular design choices. Most of these elements can be altered by the companies or, where necessary, age restricted, without removing young people from these services altogether.

A wholesale ban could then be explored if those targeted measures fail or platforms don't comply. Indonesia and Canada are now taking that approach by requiring that these platforms meet defined safety criteria before children can create accounts.

Learn from other industries

For features that do require age verification, we need to develop safety systems similar to those in areas like architecture, drug testing and food service. Such infrastructure can be considered "high-stakes," because it is implemented when laypeople cannot directly evaluate a product’s safety themselves and the consequences of failure are severe, such as the collapse of an apartment building.

We argue that online identity verification matches this pattern; no user can verify whether a vendor or platform properly handles and disposes of the photographs and identity documents required to verify their age, and the consequences of failure — misuse by the platforms or identity theft — are severe and often irreversible. For example, in 2025 the Federal Trade Commission received over 1.3 million reports of identity theft, with estimated losses of more than $15.8 billion.

We do not endorse specific technical standards, as our experience in counter-abuse technology shows that adversaries continually work to subvert online protections. Just as a bridge decays over time due to weather and usage, and needs to be maintained, regularly inspected and eventually replaced, we need to continue recognizing and adapting to new online threats over time.

Three attributes common to existing high-stakes safety systems would help address online age verification.

First, expert-led committees typically set and update safety standards, which agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration adopt and enforce. The technical standards behind age verification are very new, and they don't have the same level of government support to help develop or enforce them. For example, Google and Apple take different technical approaches to secure age verification in their mobile operating systems, which could make different systems less compatible over time. We strongly encourage governments to invest in supporting information security, internet and web standards bodies to move their work forward more quickly and to help the entire tech industry converge on common practices. Those standards should also be revised on a fixed schedule, in the same way that the building code is updated every three years.

Second, products in most high-stakes industries require review before they can be rolled out. Drug trials are extensive and scientifically rigorous, buildings require certified plans and inspections, and restaurants require a health certificate before they can serve a single meal. Age-verification vendors should face similar preapproval inspection, with computer architecture assessments, code reviews and adversarial security testing. Critically, social media companies should pass an equivalent review before deploying age verification.

Third, our food, drugs and buildings are safer than they otherwise would be because we fund full-time government experts in proportion to commercial activity in those sectors. This often takes the form of significant up-front fees for the companies involved ‪—‬ pharmaceutical companies must fund drug trials, and contractors must obtain building permits. This money covers the salaries and operating costs of trained inspectors. Vendors and social media companies should pay similar high fees, both up front for pre-review and annually for ongoing supervision, scaled to each company's audience size and scope of services.

In conclusion, we call on governments to approach child safety online as an ongoing challenge rather than a one-time regulatory fix. Making children safer online will take years of continued research into both child behavior and new technologies. One useful model is the progressive regulation of automobiles. Since the mid-1960s, new technologies and government targets have driven tailpipe emissions for most passenger vehicles down 99% and fatalities per mile down 78% per million vehicle miles traveled. If we take a similar approach to reducing online harms to our children, we are confident that we can achieve similar remarkable improvements in the years to come.

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