New York University professor Jonathan Haidt’s proposal for an under-16 ban in his 2024 best-selling book, The Anxious Generation, drew widespread attention. Australia’s first-of-its-kind social media ban for children under 16 went into effect nearly a year ago. Now, policymakers around the world are considering social media age restrictions.

Age verification laws have transformed from regional experiments to widespread policy. Following the global precedent set by Louisiana’s State Bill 162 and the UK’s Online Safety Act, more than half of US states have implemented aggressive laws that restrict free internet access. These laws are aimed at protecting children from accessing adult content. However, such measures have yet to prove effective, come at the cost of your data and privacy, and may have side effects that harm marginalized groups. With frequent breaches and data leaks, the move to require even more personal information to browse the web is questionable at best.

Washington – The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Florida’s HB3, restricting access to social media for teens, can be enforced ahead of the First Amendment issues being fully heard in federal court. The Court made this determination in a decision issued today reversing and vacating a preliminary injunction that would have blocked the law.

In our last post, we discussed how Meta is now legally obligated to restrict what teens may see on Facebook and Instagram. And in order to comply with those obligations, Meta must know which users are teens; that requires age assurance. Within a year, Meta must apply an age assurance method to every Facebook and Instagram user in the states that participated in the settlements, sorting users as under 13, ages 13 through 17, or over 18.

On May 6, 2027, the app store on every phone in Utah has to figure out how old its owner is. That means your teenager’s phone. Your phone. Even your mom’s phone. The company that lobbied for that law is Meta.

The government of Turkey on Saturday formally banned access to social media platform for children under the age of 15. The law was published today following the Turkish Parliament's adoption of the bill last April. The ban will come into force on Nov. 1.

Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents.

The European Commission’s proposed EU KIDS Act would bar children under 15 from creating or using accounts on certain social-networking and video-sharing services, with a guardian-controlled option for 13- and 14-year-olds. It would also require providers to build broader safety protections into their services. Both sets of obligations would rely on age assurance—methods for verifying or estimating users’ ages.

During testing evaluations with safeguards turned down, two OpenAI models silently bypassed the security guardrails in their testing environment, hopped onto the open internet, and attacked the open-source company Hugging Face. As reporting rolled in, politicians were alerted to an AI future of elevated cybersecurity risk. What they are yet to discover is how that risk may soon expose the privacy and cybersecurity downsides of laws designed to protect children online.