Access Bans and Safety by Design, Child Online Safety Laws in the U.S. and Abroad

Instagram’s parent company, Meta, recently reached a $17 billion settlement with dozens of state attorneys general in a lawsuit regarding child mental health. The settlement requires implementation of safety features, including time limits and access restrictions during school hours. The settlement also contains provisions encouraging other social media companies to adopt similar features.

This lawsuit majorly contributes to ongoing discourse about child online safety, social media, and youth mental health. While research is ongoing, many scholars support regulating or outright banning social media for young people.

In the United States, the regulatory landscape for technology, specifically social media, and young people is thin at the federal level: the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), is currently the only federal law regulating young people’s interactions with technology. COPPA, which became effective in 2000, aims to protect children’s privacy rather than to shield them from the effects of technology use.

Federal lawmakers have not been idle, however. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which was proposed in 2024 with bipartisan support, would have forced technology companies to offer children greater privacy options and to provide parents with access tools. The legislation would have also imposed a duty of care on technology companies to mitigate harm. Elements of KOSA are still being considered, though in an amended form that drops the duty of care, under the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act), which passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2026 and is headed to the Senate.

In addition to federal efforts, states have introduced their own child online safety legislation. In July, Nebraska began enforcing the Age Appropriate Online Design Code Act, which mandates built-in safeguards for minors. Earlier this year, Idaho enacted a law to restrict social media’s addictive features for child users.

The United States is not the only country pursuing child online safety legislation. Many countries have pushed for various regulations, a notable example being Australia’s social media ban for those under 16.

Child online safety laws take a myriad of approaches. As stated, Australia instituted social media bans for people under a certain age. Nebraska and other states, such as California, have adopted “safe-by-design” regulations that focus on the structure and nature of the online platforms and products, rather than limiting access based on age.

These laws cover a range of online products. Certain laws, such as Idaho’s, specifically target social media sites, while others cover any online product that is used extensively by minors, such as video games.

Child online safety laws have received pushback worldwide. Some commentators say these laws infringe on young people’s privacy and free expression. Bans have been criticized for depriving young people of the benefits of social media, such as increased communication and connection with communities. Some commentators remain concerned that these laws would allow for censorship of internet content. The efficacy of these laws has also been called into question.

In this week’s Saturday Seminar, scholars discuss the necessity, efficacy, and shortcomings of child online safety policies and offer insight for future policy.

• In a working paper for the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, Leonardo Bursztyn and coauthors examine Australia’s first-in-the-world social-media ban for users under 16, finding that only about 27 percent of 14- and 15-year-olds comply. Bursztyn and his team show that group dynamics are vital to compliance. They explain that social media’s value depends on peer participation and that teenagers need roughly two-thirds of their peers to stop using the platforms before they would comply themselves. The Bursztyn team contends that, at current state, the ban appears unlikely to sustain itself. For states considering similarly restrictive laws, the Bursztyn team suggests that access restrictions alone may be poorly suited to regulating products whose value is fundamentally social.
• In a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health article, Ulm University’s Franziska Köhler-Dauner and several coauthors compare international approaches to online child protection and argue that blanket access restrictions inadequately address the risks they seek to prevent. Drawing on evidence that children circumvent age limits and that restrictive policies can shift users toward less regulated spaces, Köhler-Dauner and her colleagues propose an age-tiered model that combines limited access for younger children with stronger safeguards as children mature. They also emphasize platform design: safety-by-design obligations and digital-media education can protect children without treating exclusion as the default. The Köhler-Dauner team offers a framework for policymakers evaluating whether state laws should regulate children’s access or how they engage with online products.
• The mechanisms mandated by child online safety laws will make the internet worse and will harm minors, writes Eric Goldman in a Stanford Technology Law Review article. Goldman contends that age authentication or estimation-based child online safety laws over-restrict minors and carry dangers for both consumers and publishers, such as privacy issues, increased security risks, and an increased potential for censorship and surveillance. Goldman notes that minors’ needs and relationships to online products are heterogeneous and that the benefits of age-based bans for some minors might come at the expense of other minors, as some subpopulations’ needs conflict. Goldman advocates digital literacy and education, and urges policymakers to fund further research.
• Many child online safety laws have broad parental access and control as a central feature, but, in an article for the Virginia Law Review, Danielle Keats Citron and Ari Ezra Waldman argue that this ignores important privacy interests of young people and is not an effective safety tool. Citron and Waldman note that intimate privacy is central to children’s development and parental control over a child’s relationship to technology can threaten both development and parental relationships. Citron and Waldman also assert that expecting parental control to result in online safety is unrealistic due to the amount of youth technology usage and how quickly it changes, citing that less than 1 percent of parents use Snapchat’s parental monitoring tools.
• In a policy statement for the American Academy of Pediatrics, the University of Michigan Medical School’s Tiffany Munzer and several coauthors set out a framework for understanding and managing the relationship between children and screens in the digital age. Rather than focusing solely on child behavior or simple policies like screen limits, Munzer and her team consider a range of important players within the sociological model of a children’s digital ecosystem, including families, caregivers, practitioners like psychologists and social workers, and industry. After reviewing current research on associations between digital media and child development, the Munzer team provides recommendations for stakeholders within the social media ecosystem—such as parents, technology companies, and pediatricians—to encourage healthy screen usage for children.
• In a report for the Center for Democracy and Technology, Michal Luria and Aliya Bhatia examine how parents and teens perceive four common child safety policy proposals: age verification, screen-time features, algorithmic feed controls, and parental access. Luria and Bhatia suggest that, although these ideas find at least some positive reception, parents and teens recognize the challenges in designing such policies, and rigid or intrusive measures, such as ID-based age verification or parental control over phone applications, were widely unpopular. They find that both parents and teens value flexibility and transparency and the ability to adapt or incorporate new tools as teens’ age and online experience develop. They urge policymakers to emphasize user choice rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.