When Australia started a social media ban for under 16s in order to protect them online, many countries across the globe paid attention and started discussing and writing bills following a similar direction. Most of them haven’t passed, but the debate remains. Protecting the rights of children opens all kinds of delicate conversations, and they often concentrate on ways to keep them away from certain spaces, rather than making them safe and worthy of their presence from the start.
There’s something else. Banning platforms is one thing, actually keeping kids out is another question. We’ve all been there. When we’re growing up we tend to look for windows when the doors are closed. Marianne, our SWANA regional director, can confirm this. She started her online life at 13… tricking the system to believe she was 45. That’s more than a glitch in the system: It’s the system showing it wasn’t too keen in sealing the spaces where kids were not meant to be without protection, nor they had their safety in mind when building the space.
We’re seeing this play out in real time. In Australia, more than eight in ten young teens and preteens are still using social media three months after the country’s under-16 ban came into effect. About half of them kept their accounts simply because no one checked their age. As digital wellbeing researcher Joanna Orlando put it, tech-savvy teens have other options too: VPNs, fake birth photos for face scans, or a quiet migration to platforms the ban forgot to mention.
Earlier this year, Vlad said in his brief on the question: it is worth remembering what children themselves have to say.
Young people describe digital spaces as essential to learning, social connection, identity formation, and civic participation. He even came across a Reddit thread by a user who identified themselves as 14, documenting, in careful detail, their efforts to “de-Google” their digital life: running alternative services, managing privacy settings, using two-factor authentication. If we let ourselves go with the blanket narrative that only looks at harms and risks we’re erasing much of the perspective of those we’re aiming to protect.
Who gets to walk away
When it comes to children’s rights online, everyone plays a role — parents, users, children, governments and civil society. But it’s worth asking plainly who tends to walk away from responsibility.
Take for example one aspect, the infinite scroll that is being fought out in courts. Platforms defend the infinite scroll, addictive design, and the harvesting of personal data as the cost of “connection” and “innovation.” What that framing conveniently leaves out is that it’s experimentation carried out for profit, on people, most of whom never agreed to be the test subjects. And children, who are directly affected by all of it, are rarely part of the room where these decisions get made.
We’re not asking platforms to apologize better after something breaks. We’re asking them to take responsibility and stop treating infinite scroll, addictive design, and data extraction as the point of the product in the first place. These are public spaces where millions of people spend meaningful parts of their lives — and they carry society’s problems into the digital world with them, whether platforms plan for that or not.
However, we keep tripping over the same stone dragging other rights down in the fall. In Chile, civil society — including us — raised concerns over the government’s plan to use the national digital ID, Clave Única, as an identity verifier on social media. A system built to certify who someone is can just as easily become a system that tracks everything they do online, creating a centralized, traceable record of a person’s activity. Any age verification system, we argued, has to hold itself to principles of data minimization, security, proportionality, transparency, and independent oversight — while still protecting the freedoms it risks disproportionately restricting.
Social Media Bans are on the rise, so what now?
Part of what makes this topic so difficult to talk about is that children’s rights are an emotional subject, and emotional subjects get weaponized easily. Conversations derail. And too often, the people who should be talking to each other — child rights advocates, policymakers, security and tech experts, civil society — simply aren’t. Add to that a real asymmetry: not everyone has access to the same information or the same resources to research these issues deeply, there’s no consensus yet, not between communities, and often not within them either. We don’t even have a shared language for talking about this across regions and sectors. Partners in the SWANA region, for example, have only recently begun looking at children’s rights online and are unsure where to begin, in part because so many countries in the region are simultaneously proposing social media bans against a backdrop of extensive online and offline repression. They’re looking to learn from how partners in other regions have approached the same terrain.
We don’t pretend to have all the answers. What we do have is a commitment: We must bring together the people that need to be talking in the same room and to each other, including young people themselves. We believe holding regional and global convenings between child rights and digital rights advocates, technical experts, policymakers and youth organizations is the first step to build consensus and develop not just a common understanding but a set of principles that can be used to advocate for policy that ensures the rights of children in digital spaces.
We’ve also committed to building evidence based on a common understanding that would support those working on children’s rights in digital spaces. The evidence is increasingly illustrating this: safer digital environments come from changing how platforms are built, not from expecting children to navigate products optimized to keep them scrolling. Safety needs to be a condition for going public, not a patch applied afterward. We wouldn’t allow a building to open its doors without meeting basic safety codes. Platforms should be held to the same standard.
Which is why we keep coming back to “safety,” and not only “security” or “privacy,” even though the three intersect constantly. Safety, for us, isn’t only about closing off a specific danger. It’s about designing technology that considers, from the very beginning, the wellbeing of the people who will actually use it — wellbeing in the widest sense: psychological, physical, social. The goal is not only to actively advocate for platform responsibility but also for policies that ensure safety by design. A shared understanding anchored in a few policy principles. Safety and privacy should be embedded into technology itself, so children, parents or caregivers don’t have to lose themselves in complex settings to switch these features on.
The best interests of the child should guide design and product decisions, as it already set out in the General Comment No. 25: Any regulatory initiative should also be grounded in children’s rights, with children and adolescents consulted throughout. Safety cannot be reduced to content moderation after the fact. Platforms should be anticipating harm, not reacting to it. That means building safety into how a system works, from the start. And when it comes to policy, the focus should be on what actually creates risk: recommendation systems, features designed to maximize engagement, manipulative design, targeted ads built on profiling people’s behavior. Where age checks are necessary, they need to be proportionate, and they can’t come at the cost of privacy.
And above all, we believe in bringing cross-regional experience and analysis to the people and regions only beginning to face this pressure, and in helping shift the narrative: toward a shared language, and toward placing responsibility where it actually belongs.
We still have more questions than answers, and we want to open the conversation wide. More than that, we want these conversations to cross each other, to complement each other, to feed on the stories, the cases, and the initiatives already happening in different communities and to hear from children and youth themselves. That’s where we want to start. Learning and collaborating together, so that we can feed back into every space that needs it and advocate for actual rights, as opposed to social media bans.