Australia has banned anyone under 16 from creating social media accounts, and similar minimum-age proposals are gaining ground in other countries. A pair of researchers say policymakers are moving too fast.
According to Live Science, the debate is being addressed by Jonathan Bellack, a former senior product leader in ads and online safety at Google, and Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat, a policy advisor on technology and law at the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. Both are also parents.
Supporters of age bans point to studies on the harms of youth social media use and argue that the threat of restrictions has already pushed some companies to make their products safer. Critics of bans argue that requiring adults to submit to age verification creates privacy harms and security risks. They also argue that blocking young people from these platforms infringes on their right to participate in public life and can push them toward riskier alternatives such as Telegram.
Bellack and Rosenblat say they recognize that minimum-age requirements will continue to advance if platforms fail to comply with targeted design requirements. Before policymakers move to full bans, they argue, two other approaches deserve serious consideration.
The first involves enforcing targeted, proportionate restrictions. Human rights law offers a methodology for evaluating government actions that restrict individual rights: Does the restriction achieve its purpose, or could a lesser restriction accomplish the same result? Applied to social media, a government would need to show that switching off or altering harmful platform features, or expanding parental controls, would not be enough before removing children from a service entirely.
The argument draws on the principle that the least intrusive effective measure should be tried first. Rosenblat's work focuses on governance of online gaming, social media, encrypted messaging, and immersive technologies. Bellack spent 15 years as a senior product leader at Google and was the founding director of the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Both researchers write from what they describe as professional experience alongside personal stakes, noting that the outcome of this policy debate will affect their own families directly. The push for age restrictions, they argue, is not slowing down, which makes it more important to establish whether less sweeping interventions can work first.
