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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Jonathan Bellack and Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat
Learn from other industries
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.
Three attributes common to existing high-stakes safety systems would help address online age verification.
Related storiesFirst, 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.
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.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
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