Even before France approved legislation banning social media for children under 15 last January, 13-year-old Benjamin was already wondering what life without social media would look like. “If we want to play football, we won’t be able to organize it. What will we do? Send letters instead?” he joked in an interview for Le Monde.

His reaction captured the central challenge behind the growing wave of youth social media bans: Removing access is one thing; understanding what those platforms mean in children’s lives is another.

Within weeks of Australia’s similar ban, the country’s eSafety Commissioner reported that platforms had restricted access to 4.7 million under-16 accounts. Two months later, though, one in five Australian teenagers under 16 was still using TikTok and Snapchat, according to a parental-control data company. But even if all children’s social media accounts were to disappear, do such bans actually make children safer online?

Governments are moving ahead without answering that question as they follow Australia’s lead. Indonesia’s child safety framework, which took effect in March, bars children under 16 from holding accounts on “high-risk” platforms. The UK government has announced plans to ban social media for under-16s, add default overnight social media curfews for 16- and 17-year-olds, and extend child-safety rules to cover risky AI features. And on 17 September, the European Commission proposed the EU KIDS Act, which would bar children under 13 from social media, set 15 as the EU-wide minimum age for opening an account independently, and require platforms to show that their services are age-appropriate and safe by design.

But based on my experience working on Child Online Protection initiatives with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, I know the bans don’t address the real problems. Instead, we should be paying more attention to the systems that generate harm in the first place—namely, recommender algorithms, engagement-maximizing design, opaque moderation, and extractive data practices.

Account removals are not the same as online child safety

My experience working on protecting children’s online safety has taught me three main lessons:

First, the public institutions responsible for child online protection often lack the staff, budget, or technical capacity to enforce complex online safety policies.

Indonesia is illustrative. A 2026 UNICEF evaluation found capacity constraints among service providers, long-term funding uncertainty, and a need for specialized personnel. At the local level, some staff lacked digital skills, while budget constraints left some areas reliant on external support.

Second, many children, and often their parents, lack the digital literacy and critical thinking skills needed to navigate online risks safely. My policy research on child online protection in Indonesia, published earlier this year in Digital Society, found substantial gaps that account removals cannot repair: Many children lacked guidance on navigating the internet safely, and large numbers did not know how to report harmful experiences.

And third, the platforms have limited independent oversight as they identify underage users, design age-verification systems, and report their own compliance. In Indonesia, platforms themselves are responsible for carrying out age verification, while the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs oversees compliance. TikTok’s appeals process for users flagged as underage, for instance, can require a government-issued ID and selfies, which is a problem because it involves collecting the additional personal data on an ID card, beyond that needed to confirm age. Will government regulators ensure that TikTok handles that data responsibly?

The privacy paradox of proving age

Every age-based ban creates an engineering problem: How can a platform reliably determine that a user is old enough, without intruding on other information? Governments and companies may use identity documents, parental authorization, app-store checks, or facial age estimation. Each approach has trade-offs between accuracy, privacy, accessibility, and resistance to circumvention.

There are also technical issues. One tool, facial age estimation, draws on enormous databases but it is probabilistic, not exact, because people vary so much. It’s also been shown to misclassify both children and adults.

The challenge should not merely be to “verify age.” It should be to prove that someone is above a threshold, without disclosing their identity, birth date, or other information third parties might use to create a marketing profile. The European Commission’s age-verification blueprint challenges companies to verify ages without collecting all that additional information.

Privacy-preserving technologies offer promising ways to achieve this. Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) can confirm that someone meets an age threshold without revealing their identity or exact date of birth. W3C Verifiable Credentials are cryptographically verifiable digital claims that can disclose only the information needed, such as “over 16.” And device-based age signals can allow a phone or app store to share an age range without revealing a user’s exact birth date. But these methods still require rigorous security testing, common standards, independent oversight, and clear limits on data retention. Otherwise, poorly designed child-safety policies risk creating permanent identity infrastructures in which businesses, not people, control personal data.

Where connection goes when a platform closes

Blocking access to a platform redirects some young people, but not always where expected. Early anecdotal reports in Australia pointed to teenagers migrating to smaller, less-regulated platforms like Yope, a pattern the Cato Institute flagged as a “whack-a-mole” problem for regulators. But industry data collected two months later found no broad-based shift of that kind, aside from a small uptick in WhatsApp use. Many teens simply found a way to stay on the banned platforms.

This points to a deeper gap in current society: the erosion of youth “third places“ physical spaces where young people have room to socialize and build identity outside home and school. As those spaces have diminished, commercial communications platforms have absorbed that role.

For many teenagers, social media workarounds are merely inconvenient. But for isolated, marginalized, disabled, or LGBTQ+ youth who depend on online communities for support that’s otherwise unavailable, displacement can mean losing certain kinds of belonging, or having to move to a platform with even weaker oversight.

How to design safer online systems for children

If blanket social media bans don’t work, then what will? The platforms have created many of the conditions that governments are now trying to contain: engagement-optimized recommenders, intrusive data practices, weak safeguards against unwanted contact, and features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, streaks, and persistent notifications.

These design patterns increasingly face regulatory scrutiny, including under the European Union’s Digital Services Act. A 2026 study from the 5Rights Foundation that tracked children’s device use minute by minute found that the user interfaces shape children’s attention, sleep, and well-being in real time.

A more durable response would regulate those interfaces directly, treating children as legitimate users whose privacy, agency, and well-being are required protections, not afterthoughts. That means designing for safety from the outset. One example would be for children’s apps to have high-privacy defaults, such as private accounts and location sharing switched off for minors. They could also have recommender systems that explain the main factors shaping a feed and give young users more control over personalization. The European Commission has published age-appropriate interaction guidelines that limit unsolicited contact and prevent minors from being added to groups without consent. Rules could also prohibit engagement-maximizing features that demand users’ attention, such as autoplay, infinite scroll, usage streaks, read receipts, and push notifications, by disabling or limiting them by default.

Governments should define measurable outcomes and fund independent evaluation, platforms should give researchers meaningful data access, and engineers should audit age-assurance systems for bias and data leakage. Schools, parents, and children themselves need a seat in designing the technology that’s designed to protect children.

If policymakers still decide to remove an infrastructure for youth connection, they should offer something better in return. Social media bans may reduce some forms of exposure to harmful content and may be justified for particular ages, services, or risks. But they are just one tool, not a comprehensive substitute for safer design, accountable platforms, digital literacy, institutional capacity, and non-commercial digital “third places”—moderated communities, creative spaces, and public-interest platforms designed for youth participation rather than profit.

The first wave of social media restrictions isn’t enough to keep children safe. Governments are still measuring what’s easiest to count, while neglecting harder-to-measure outcomes such as children’s access to safe third places and meaningful social connection, both online and offline. Until governments can show evidence that harm has actually declined, they will keep mistaking account removal for safety.