Social media policy is evolving beyond age limits
Since Australia took up the cause of higher age limits on social media in 2024, the push for such policies has spread like wildfire. A ban on under-16s came into effect down under in December 2025, and since then another 41 countries have either implemented their own or begun taking actions in that direction.
There’s no denying the policy is a controversial one. On one side, you have parents and advocates of children’s safety pointing to the harms of social media addiction and the type of content that can be pushed at teens when they use the platforms. Pushing back against them are privacy advocates and digital rights campaigners who worry about how all that data to verify people’s ages is going to be used and whether it makes sense to limit young people’s access to online spaces altogether.
Maybe there was a day when social media was all it once claimed to be — an altruistic means of connecting people so they could keep in touch, engage with their community, be more informed, and maybe even push for positive change. But that is clearly not how these platforms operate today.
If you appreciate analysis like this of the tech industry, become a paying subscriber. I can only do this work because of the support of readers like you.
As the pressure to grow their user bases, accelerate engagement, and increase profits intensified, so too did unethical behaviors designed to keep people on the platforms for longer periods of time. It included serving users content to keep them coming back, sometimes to push them toward political extremes or even make them feel bad about themselves in relation to others.
There’s no doubt in my mind that modern social media is a toxic product that is long overdue for regulation. The question is whether higher age limits and stricter enforcement of them is the right way to achieve that.
I’ve been quite clear from the beginning that I’m not inherently opposed to making it harder for young people to access social media platforms, given the negative personal and social effects they have. After years of handwringing, I felt we needed to start taking swings — even if they were imperfect ones. The question for me has always been more centered around whether the policy is effective and is delivering the outcomes we actually want. That’s where I’ve been worried that putting so much focus on age limits was leading us in the wrong direction.
The effectiveness of the Australian legislation so far is debatable. Young people are clearly getting around it in high numbers, but those who point to those figures often miss (or intentionally leave out) how the legislation isn’t yet fully implemented. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is currently investigating five platforms for potential non-compliance. But even worse is how focusing on an age limits frames the problem as one that narrowly affects youth and potentially shifts energy away from forcing companies to change how platforms are designed.
So many of the features of modern social media platforms were made to keep us engaged and feed us regular dopamine hits, from the infinite scroll of content to like buttons and incessant notifications. Algorithms have been designed over many years to surface content that will keep us hooked, often pulling in things that are sensational and extreme in place of posts from friends or family to ensure we spend more time with our screens, and as a result, looking at ads. There’s no question that has negative implications for young people — but it does for everyone else too.
As I watched the effort to ban youth from social media spread around the world, this was precisely my concern: that the more effective policy would be sidelined for the easier and more populist one. That instead of targeting how the platforms function, we would simply kick off young people and call it a day. I saw that repeated as the debate around age limits finally came to Canada in recent months.
Media coverage made it seem that an age limit would be central to provincial and federal efforts to address the harms of social media. I began speaking out against seeing that policy as a silver bullet and the need for measures focused on platform design and algorithmic amplification in addition to the age limit, if not in place of it. But when the federal government finally rolled out its Safe Social Media Act on June 10, I was pleasantly surprised at the nuanced positions it took on the issue.
The media focused on the higher age limit — it’s been happening in other parts of the world and is easier for people not well-versed in tech policy to understand, including many journalists — but it was not really the centerpiece of the legislation. If anything, the age limit serves as a stick to get companies to comply with a broader set of design standards meant to make their platforms safer for younger users. Unlike in the Australian legislation, if platforms make those changes, they can win an exemption from the age limit.
One of the problem is that the focus is on changing how platforms operate for younger users, when many of those “safer by design” standards should apply regardless of a user’s age to reduce the addictiveness, mental health impacts, and broader antisocial nature of what we call “social” media. The Canadian legislation also targets various types of harmful content that can spread on platforms, including those that sexualize children or incite violence, proposes the creation of a Digital Safety Commission that sounds not unlike Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, and begins to extend some of those standards and responsibilities to AI chatbots.
This is not just a Canadian phenomenon. Australia, having been a pioneer on the social media age limits, is also rolling out a “digital duty of care” for social media platforms that will include an expectation that platforms be “safe by design.” Earlier this year, Brazil’s Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents came into force too, setting age limitations on social media paired with prohibitions on addictive design choices like infinite scroll and video autoplay.
These developments make me more hopeful than I expected to be upon seeing the Canadian legislation. There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about how precisely the different aspects of the plan will work, but to me it shows that the perfect is the enemy of the good and ultimately leaves the major tech companies off the hook for the harms they’re causing.
There are clearly problems with social media age limits, but the experimentation with that policy got the ball rolling and also got the public engaged in talking about the issue. Just six months after Australia’s implementation of its age limit, we’re already seeing other countries learn from their experience and improve their own social media legislation in response, including by focusing more on those design and algorithmic interventions.
I found McGill University professor Taylor Owen’s breakdown of the Canadian legislation instructive on this front:
It brings together what has worked in peer democracies. From Britain, design rules that make products safe for kids by default and a duty of care. From the European Union, risk assessments, transparency requirements, and data access for independent researchers. From Australia, a narrow takedown obligation for child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images, removed within 24 hours. And a strong independent regulator with power to enforce it all. This approach learns the right lessons from a decade of other governments’ trial and error. But this bill adds two genuinely new elements: conditional age restrictions, and the inclusion of AI chatbots.
In short, it learns from other jurisdictions while moving the ball forward in other ways for its peers to learn from too. There is still work to be done and issues to work out, but policy experimentation rather than endlessly debating the perfect solution while getting nowhere is the way to actually make progress on reining in the power of major tech companies. I feel more than ever that the voices that act primarily to criticize and delay action are helping the tech companies avoid accountability, even though they often claim to be doing otherwise.
Taking on the power of the US tech giants will be a marathon, not a sprint, but getting to the finish line requires us to actually start the race. Now that we have, we can improve as we go. Doing so requires us to push our governments to do better, but we shouldn’t ignore the signs that they are receptive to expert voices — and of learning from one another. It should have happened years ago, but we should take what we can get, and make sure we don’t make the same mistake of waiting far too long to take on the harms of AI chatbots too.
If you appreciate analysis like this of the tech industry, become a paying subscriber. I can only do this work because of the support of readers like you.
