The push to protect children from social media’s harms is gaining momentum globally and beginning to reach Big Tech’s home turf.
A groundbreaking Los Angeles jury verdict last week found Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google negligent in the design and operation of their popular platforms — saying they harmed a young user with products created to be addictive. Now, several states including California are getting serious about potential regulation to limit young people on social media, following a trend that’s accelerated in recent months around the world.
Australia kicked off the global push, forcing the companies along with TikTok Inc., Snap Inc. and Elon Musk’s X to boot Australian users under 16 off their platforms in December. The movement has since gained traction with Indonesia, parts of India, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Canada and others discussing bans. Austria said on Friday it aims to pass legislation to curb social media use this year, Denmark has already agreed to similar restrictions, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has said the sites’ mental health damage to children is “unambiguous.”
The result is a patchwork of proposals that range from outright bans for younger teenagers, like in Australia’s regime, to requiring parental approval or oversight, like in Brazil and Portugal. Different countries have different ideas about which technology companies should be covered and regulators are grappling with a spectrum of ways that teenagers can connect and share content online. Such varied approaches across so many jurisdictions will make tech companies’ compliance more complex.
“Parents around the world are really understanding the nefarious impact that social media is having on their kids’ mental health and their physical safety,” said Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center, which represented the plaintiff in the LA case.
He said governments or states imposing social media age regulations can work in a complimentary manner to the legal path his organization is taking to hold the companies accountable for their actions.
Young people are important to Big Tech because they are building habits, he said. “It’s not dissimilar to cigarette companies,” he said. “If you can get them hooked in their teens, they will be lifetime customers throughout.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has started saying that he, too, wants to restrict access for those under 16, even though his state is home to Instagram, Google’s YouTube and Snapchat. The platforms face thousands of product liability lawsuits in the US, and attorneys general in about 30 states are also suing the firms. The companies could face tens of billions of dollars in liability, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
The addiction verdict spoke to the core of what makes the networks popular and lucrative: their algorithms, personalized recommendations and infinite scroll, and increasing global regulations could impact how the services are designed. It followed a New Mexico jury’s determination that Meta misled teenagers there about the safety of its social networks, awarding civil penalties totaling $375 million.
Meta and Google said they disagree with the LA addiction verdict, and plan to appeal. Meta also plans to appeal in New Mexico.
Still, the evidence for how effective the bans are is mixed. Three months after Australia’s took effect, many children are circumventing age verification systems or using virtual private networks to access social media. Many parents in the country welcome the ban, though others say it’s pointless to try to take services away from teens who have been using them for years.
The most pressing threat from the bans, analysts and industry insiders say, is that chipping away at their young user bases may deprive social media platforms of their future audience. Users may start to abandon social platforms or use them less frequently as they age. And if fewer young people sign up to replace them, the network effect that makes the services attractive diminishes.
“The threat is building to Meta, Snap and TikTok from the erosion of the pipeline of younger users critical to lifetime-value projections, with European efforts to ban social media for teens set to be super-charged” after the LA verdict, wrote Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Tamlin Bason.
The platforms recognize that adding age verification procedures slows down new user acquisition, stifling growth, said one former platform executive, asking not to be identified. There is a significant negative impact for signups, the person said. Such restrictions also require knowing users’ ages, which is not an exact science and can require more information from people. Holding more personal information comes with potential privacy risks.
Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg testified that teens make up just 1% of company revenue. Still, populous emerging markets weighing bans represent some of the largest social media user bases — and the biggest potential pools of new users. North America and Europe typically represent Big Tech’s most lucrative geographies, where average revenues per user are among the world’s highest.
The US court victories have added momentum to the accountability movement, and even some of those in the industry are joining the chorus. Pinterest Inc. Chief Executive Officer Bill Ready said social media “as currently configured isn’t safe for users under 16 — both here in the US and around the globe.” In 2023, the San Francisco-based visual search and discovery service made accounts for under-16s private. He said social media — at least the way his larger rivals operate — risks becoming the next “Big Tobacco.” The LA verdict is “a wake-up call: the industry must step up now with real safeguards for young people,” he said.
“A group of ordinary American citizens did what US regulators have so far failed to do” in holding Big Tech responsible in the recent US cases, Joanne Gray, chair of discipline for media and communications at the University of Sydney, said of the verdict. “For politicians who are interested in addressing the ongoing issues and harms presented by social media, it should help support a more aggressive political agenda,” she said, though free speech protections may shield the companies.
Many platforms stress that they have strong safeguards for children already in place, and that bans may encourage children to visit more dangerous corners of the internet. Meta, Google and X didn’t respond to requests for comment on the proliferation of age restrictions globally or the likelihood of such rules coming to the US. “We believe that banning minors is a bad idea. Something needs to be done, but banning them is not the right solution, especially when we look at the Australian example,” said Jean Gonié, Senior Director of EMEA Public Policy at Snap.
“We will enforce the law, whatever it may be. We want this regulation to not create other problems, and to be truly enforced,” said Gaultier Brand-Gazeau, head of public affairs for TikTok France, speaking about proposed French rules. TikTok already has age estimation tools and restrictions. It removes 25 million users per quarter globally for breaching them, he said.
Meta rolled out “teen accounts” for Instagram in 2024, limiting who can follow and interact with younger users and restricting those customers from seeing sensitive content. Users who tell X that they’re under 18 years old default to a “protected posts” setting, which gives teenagers more control about who can follow them and see their content, the company said on its website.
“Age limits are spreading because they are popular amongst parents globally who are tired of fighting with kids about being on their phones too much,” said Ravi Iyer, who led research, data science and product teams at Meta, later contributing to Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book about social media’s impact, The Anxious Generation. “Many kids also feel like they are on their phones too much,” said Iyer, who is now managing director of the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center. “So it makes for a truly bipartisan, popular issue” globally.
In France, Emmanuel Macron has made a proposed social media ban for children under 15 one of his key priorities, with hopes it will be in effect in September. “This ban is not perfect, it is not the ideal solution, but it is the only one we have to try to protect our youth,” said Laure Miller, a lawmaker from Macron’s party.
The Los Angeles verdict provides a “very clear message that online platforms have to take seriously the risks that they are posing,” the European Union’s top technology official, Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen, said Thursday. The commission that day announced it has opened an investigation into how Snapchat verifies its users’ ages and other issues.
Platforms won many of their US court fights in prior years because of a law that protects them from liability for content posted by their users. But the California lawsuit focused on product liability, arguing the companies had intentionally designed services that are addictive. “Their shield is gone,” Haidt wrote on LinkedIn on Wednesday following the verdict.
Purnell writes for Bloomberg.
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