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.

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.