Governments are moving faster to keep children off social media, after years of evidence that recommendation systems can steer young users toward harmful material and keep them scrolling. The harder question is whether age bans fix the problem or just shove it behind a login screen with worse privacy tradeoffs.
Australia last year became the first country to try to block under-16s from major social platforms. The United Arab Emirates followed in June with a ban for users under 15 on services including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and X. France’s lawmakers passed a bill Tuesday barring social media for anyone under 15, with President Emmanuel Macron expected to sign it. In the UK, officials have laid out a plan for an optional midnight social media curfew for 16- and 17-year-olds next spring, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in June that he wanted a tougher under-16 ban passed “before Christmas.”
The policy rush has a real target. A study by the 5Rights Foundation found that a platform in Mexico recommended content referencing suicide to an account presented as a teenage girl after 40 minutes of browsing. Medical groups and child safety advocates have also raised concerns about design features such as infinite scroll, which keeps feeding users new posts without a natural stopping point. That mechanism is not mysterious. Engagement-based ranking systems learn what keeps a person watching, tapping or arguing, then serve more of it. The machine does not care whether the loop is healthy.
Several organizations that study children’s rights online, however, have warned that blanket bans leave the platform design problem intact. Early evidence from Australia is not flattering. Six months after the restrictions took effect, seven in 10 parents told Australia’s eSafety Commissioner that their children still had accounts on Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat.
The workarounds are predictable and grubby in the way internet workarounds usually are: VPNs, fake dates of birth, borrowed credentials from parents or older siblings, and, in reported cases involving Meta’s filters, fake mustaches. Age gates tend to become an arms race between teenagers and compliance departments, which is a sentence that should embarrass every adult involved.
Verification also creates its own attack surface. Systems that check identity can require sensitive documents or biometric data. Discord said that after it implemented age verification in 2025, a security incident involving a third-party customer service provider affected more than 70,000 identity documents. That is the privacy bargain regulators are asking minors to make: prove who you are to avoid harm, then hope the proof does not leak.
Dilmar Villena, executive director of the Peruvian digital rights group Hiperderecho, said unequal access to education, supervision and public services must be part of the debate, especially in Latin America. Social platforms can be risky, but they also serve as places to find information, social support and identity communities, including for LGBTQ+ teenagers, people of color and disabled young people.
The platform lists also have holes. Some rules focus on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and X, while leaving out services such as WhatsApp or Roblox, where minors can interact with strangers. Other proposals sweep in YouTube, despite its educational uses. A regulation built around a named app list starts aging the moment a new teen hangout gets traction.
Advocates cited in WIRED en Español argue for a design-and-accountability approach instead. Brazil has pushed for more usable parental controls, less addictive design, more transparency about recommendation systems and local staff at large tech companies. Angie Contreras of Cultivando el Género said digital life extends everyday life, so children need protections and rights online rather than exclusion from online spaces. Lorena Villavicencio, executive secretary of Mexico’s National System for the Comprehensive Protection of Children and Adolescents, said Mexico is preparing a social media regulation initiative focused on building stronger protections into platforms by design.
That is the less tidy version of child safety policy. It asks governments to regulate product architecture, schools to teach digital literacy, families to get usable guidance and platforms to stop pretending the feed is a weather system. Bans are easier to announce. They are harder to make real.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
