Social media bans won’t protect our children. It’s time for a paradigm shift.

As a mother of two girls and Director of COFACE Families Europe since 2016, I have closely monitored European developments in the safer internet space for 10 years and the situation has intensified rapidly due to the fast evolution of technological developments.

Member organisations of the COFACE network represent families of all types without discrimination. There are more than 50 organisations of families across 26 countries which carry out advocacy, shape policy, carry out research, provide services and peer support spaces, as well as non-formal education in schools in many fields which affect families. This includes the field of safer internet.

That is the voice that I bring into discussions at the European level with key stakeholders as well as the European institutions, including the special panel advising President von der Leyen about online safety: a voice which is summed up in the recently published position paper of COFACE on digital safety and well-being.

Rather than blanket social media age restrictions, it is time for a paradigm shift away from engagement-based business models towards human-rights-based models online. Families are doing their best for their children, but they cannot be alone to ensure a balance of participation, protection and empowerment online. Tech companies need to ensure that their technology is designed in an age-appropriate manner, incorporating sufficient safeguards, and that they respect human rights, including children’s rights. Regulators must set clear rules, ensure they are fully enforced and hold tech companies to account. 

Our organisation contributes to the current discussion on introducing and enforcing age restrictions for children and young people accessing social media, as a means of better protecting them from online risks. We advocate for a holistic, evidence-based, rights-based and inclusive approach to digital safety and well-being for children and their families. Children are exposed to many online risks and should be better protected in the digital environment. However, the solution must be holistic and consider different family realities, as well as children’s rights in the digital environment. Child protection should be organised within the digital environment, not in opposition, and it should also be integrated into pedagogical and social contexts. This protection goes hand in hand with the responsibility of tech companies to ensure that their products and services are safe. If they do not respect the rules and children’s rights, they should be banned from the market. To ensure that children’s rights in the digital environment are realised through both protection and empowerment, digital literacy education plays a key role. Finally, children need access to safe and participatory spaces, both online and offline, where they can learn, play, inform themselves and have fun.  

At COFACE, we will continue following further research and policy developments and contribute to ensuring a safer and more inclusive digital environment for all, and especially for children. We believe that different actors can contribute to digital safety and well-being for children and, therefore, have formulated some key recommendations for different stakeholders. However, the main focus is on the responsibility of the technology companies themselves. They know their products and services best, and they have the necessary resources to ensure safe digital experiences and comply with their due diligence obligations.

The Lisbon Council Evidence Hub on Social Media Bans for Kids highlights the different age assurance methods used by tech platforms, with most still relying on self-declaration (88%).

This is not reliable nor sustainable. With the huge financial investments in Artificial Intelligence today, we expect the tech industry to innovate and perfect age assurance techniques on their platforms, while also meeting privacy requirements. Without this, families will be nervous, they will continue to feel that their children are unsafe on tech platforms and products and will politically shift increasingly towards strong support of social media bans. Recent data from the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency reveals a strong preference for high age limits, with the age of 16 (16%) and the age of 18 or above (16%) emerging as the most popular legal cutoffs.

This is an inevitable trend, given that parents and carers have lost trust in the tech platforms and in their business models, which are engagement-based, using addictive algorithms to sustain maximum engagement of users, with sometimes worrying consequences for the mental health and well-being of children.

Over 20 years of social media have led to both negative and positive impacts on children. It is time for a paradigm shift where technology companies start designing their platforms in an age-appropriate manner, incorporating sufficient safeguards, and shifting away from the use of increasingly powerful algorithms which compete to capture the attention of children and adults. This is especially important during this second major wave of Artificial Intelligence, as communication actors, with the arrival of conversational AI such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others, all programmed for sustaining high levels of engagement, and in some cases even replacing family members and friends.

Having said that, in my opinion, strict and high age restrictions ultimately reflect an admission of failure: that of failing to impose on platforms and digital service providers the obligation to protect children, to integrate the well-being of minors into the very design of tools, and to offer modulated and age-appropriate environments. The European Union has a strong regulatory framework which needs to be fully enforced. Restrictions also fail to fit with the logic of children’s rights of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These rights aim to support the gradual acquisition of autonomy, including in digital environments. Any restrictions mean that parents cannot fully do their job of giving children basic/first education about the use of digital technologies and merely postpone the problem.

I remain optimistic and convinced that the tech platforms will ensure stronger child safeguarding, as this is also business common sense. They have already vastly improved their products and platforms in the last ten years, e.g. improving their default settings towards ensuring greater privacy, better content moderation, increasing parental control tools and clearer reporting mechanisms. This innovation must continue in the right direction. No tech platform wants to have the reputation of being an unsafe place for children.

Elizabeth Gosme is the Director of COFACE Families Europe, a network of 50+ family organisations across 23 countries advocating for the rights of all families without discrimination through various tools: advocacy and campaigning at the European Union level for strong social rights and gender-responsive family policies, building European research projects and developing practical tools to support parents, families and children.