Kids are outsmarting social media bans. That’s not a problem we need to solve.
Age gates can be staggeringly counterproductive, pushing kids to darker corners of the web. Closing loopholes will only make things worse.
Social media bans are stacking up. In July, France joined Australia in restricting minors from accessing social media—barring children under 15 from major platforms, before the ban was blocked by the country’s top court on human rights grounds. The UK aims to forbid kids under 16 from accessing Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms in early 2027, and the EU has announced its own plan to prohibit social media for kids under 15.
But early lessons from Australia, which enacted a ban in 2024, show that these sorts of age restrictions are easily circumvented. A study published earlier this year found that four in five teens under 16 made their way onto barred platforms. Teens have successfully explored many tactics for bypassing bans, from using a sibling’s face for ID to drawing fake facial hair.
Some proponents of bans have called for an increased focus on enforcement that blocks these workarounds. But circumvention is a signal, not a nuisance or something to be simply deterred. The fact that kids are actively looking for ways to outwit the bans highlights their limitations. Social media bans suppress kids’ access to information, including information that’s essential to their development, identity formation, and socialization, especially during adolescence. Worse, further restriction is likely to backfire. Closing loopholes in age gates could harm kids by pushing them toward less-moderated, higher-risk corners of the web. It also degrades privacy and security for everyone by forcing people to submit sensitive personal information to prove their age.
In our work, we’ve found that parents and kids both want smarter, more nuanced policies that protect children, families, and their rights. That can take the form of mandating stronger limits on data collection by companies, or giving families flexible tools to control content and access on their own terms.
Age gates won’t bring about the desired change, nor will they simplify parenting in the digital world. At best, they will only raise thornier questions and postpone the conversation to a child’s 16th birthday. At worst, they’ll leave kids with no guidance as they make their way through the online world.
A less safe internet for kids
When young people circumvent restrictions, they are often doing what we want developing minds to do and what we celebrate in other contexts: lean into curiosity, problem-solve, and exercise independence. It’s important for kids to do this online, an arena where they often develop social skills and refine their identities. Bans sweep these motivations under the rug, taking a paternalistic approach that doesn’t consider young people’s needs or the realities of what they do online.
It also ignores what some parents want. When we examined social media safety interventions last year, parents told us that they often join their kids in lies that help them gain access to needed but gated services. This isn’t a new phenomenon; research all the way back in 2011 showed that parents taught their children how to evade Facebook age restrictions. Some may say these parents are oblivious to the harms posed by the web or just don’t care. But parents are not a monolithic group. Many simply see offering their children responsible access to social media as a way to help them connect with like-minded peers, find informational content, and learn digital safety skills early on. Many parents believe the benefits outweigh the risks.
When parents don’t help provide access and kids are not able to get into the platforms they desire, they will likely move toward alternative online spaces, often ones with fewer guardrails. Sometimes kids wind up on fairly innocuous, if unconventional, platforms, communicating with each other in Google Docs or podcast comment sections. Other times they move to more dangerous platforms that can leave them vulnerable to abuse and predation. In the aftermath of the Australian social media ban, preliminary research shows that kids’ screen time has not meaningfully decreased but has sometimes been redirected, with some young users going to spaces that are unmonitored and unknown to parents. Just as cities are sketchiest when they are not bustling, the most risky platforms for young people are those with the fewest eyes on the digital street. Outdated, dying, and under-resourced platforms tend to attract both vulnerable youth and those who prey on them.
A less safe internet for all
Age gates come with dangers of their own. Some platforms automatically track users’ online activities to confirm their age. In doing so, they profile users—collecting and analyzing their data to make inferences about them, which can increase the risk that data will be misused or leaked.
Companies may also ask for personal documents like driver’s licenses to verify age, which can lead to mishandling of sensitive documents or even identity theft. Data breaches happen: Last year, for example, Discord reported that one of its third-party services, 5CA, which is used to confirm age, had been compromised, exposing at least 70,000 images of users’ government IDs. It can take little effort to find ways to use that kind of information for malicious purposes by, say, connecting driver’s licenses to specific accounts and private online activity, which could reveal anything from users’ political opinions to their sexual preferences.
Efforts to make it harder for kids to get around age gates have also led policymakers to clamp down on kids’ access to VPNs. State age verification bills in Michigan and Utah have tried to interfere with the privacy protections offered by these tools (the Utah bill is now blocked by a federal court), and Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is nudging social media platforms to detect and block their use. But requiring adult users to prove their age to gain access to a VPN fundamentally defeats the purpose of that privacy-focused technology. It can put many users, particularly journalists and human rights defenders working on sensitive issues, in danger of government surveillance and even retaliation.
What could work instead?
Rather than attempting to block young people from online services that allow them to access information and engage in age-essential communication, policymakers should focus on the incentives that drive companies to engage in behavior that creates risks for kids in the first place.
For example, platforms should decrease what experts call unhealthy engagement or addictive activity by limiting the collection and use of data that companies use to target content and features to all users, including children. Nearly all parents and teens we spoke with want policymakers to impose such restrictions, knowing full well that the companies’ use of data is at the core of features such as targeted advertisements. Both teens and parents are also frustrated by features designed to keep us all online for longer than we want.
Another approach would be to expand the availability of user-controlled tools so that families have easy, flexible, and user-friendly ways to limit access to what is undesirable. For example, keyword-based content filtering can enable a student who is targeted with a specific nickname or inside joke to block any post or comment containing it. Platforms are unlikely to know which word or term a child might want to block, nor can policy seek to address such dynamic types of harm. Policy can, however, offer tools that would put power back in users’ hands.
Poor privacy practices, anxiety-producing content streams, and a near-inescapable need to use digital technologies for everyday tasks, communication, and information-seeking have rightfully led parents and teens to want real change in how companies conduct business.
Circumvention shows where policy falls short. Stricter enforcement will mean yet more data collection, and it won’t meet kids and parents where they are.
Michal Luria is a senior research fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, leading the organization's work on evaluating and designing sociotechnical systems. Aliya Bhatia is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project where she leads policy advocacy and research on issues related to children’s safety online, multilingual technologies, and human rights governance of online platforms. Danah Boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, where her research focuses on the intersection of technology and society. Her latest book is Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census.
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