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Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban: Latest Updates

Heidi Stenning
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Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban: Latest Updates

Last Updated: December 13, 2025
Latest: Teens back on platforms within 24 hours using parents’ faces for age verification; many accounts never shut down

Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban: Latest Developments

Australia made history on December 10, 2025, becoming the first country to enforce a nationwide ban preventing children under 16 from accessing major social media platforms. The groundbreaking policy is already facing legal challenges and questions about its effectiveness.

This page tracks all major developments as the world’s first comprehensive social media age ban unfolds.

Latest Developments

December 12-13, 2025: Teens Already Back on Platforms Within 24 Hours

Parents Helping Kids Bypass the Ban

Fourteen-year-old cheerleader Lucy Brooks briefly lost some friends on Snapchat when Australia’s ban on social media came into effect on Wednesday, but within 24 hours, they were back. Many had made new accounts, with some borrowing the faces of parents and older friends who were happy to help them evade age detection technology.

Lucy noted “a lot of the time it was with the parents’ knowledge, but people are also using AI-generated pictures of people and videos, like getting AI to make a 40-year-old person”.

Many Accounts Never Shut Down

In a Sydney park, a group of four 15-year-old boys told CNN that none of them had lost their accounts. “I think it’s because I put my birthdate in as the year 2000 when I first signed up,” said one of the boys, his friends nodding.

Shar, a 15-year-old aspiring singer with 4,000 TikTok followers, reported “None of my accounts on any platform has been shut down, not even the ones that I put my real age”.

Business Impact Concerns

Lucas Lane, 16, who started his business Glossy Boys when he was 13 selling “skate-proof” nail polish mainly through Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, said “This social media ban is going to very much impact my business, and not only the business, but also the community and people here in Australia. I want people to be unique. I want people to be themselves, and I’m afraid that the government and the social media companies are not letting that happen”.

Government Celebration

To mark the ban’s introduction on Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hosted a barbecue at his Sydney residence with guests including parents of children who died by suicide after enduring cyber bullying. To celebrate the legislation, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up in patriotic green and gold with the campaign slogan “Let Them Be Kids”.

December 12, 2025: Multiple Developments as Ban Faces Early Challenges

eSafety Commissioner Demands Compliance Data

The eSafety Commissioner announced she will send the 10 targeted platforms notices on Thursday demanding information on how the age restriction is being implemented and how many accounts have been closed, stating “We will provide information to the public before Christmas on how these age restrictions are being implemented and whether preliminarily we see them working”.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the platforms already had the technology and personal data about their users to enforce the age restriction with precision, and that “the responses to these notices will form the baseline against which we will measure compliance”.

Kids Drawing Facial Hair to Fool Age Detection

Parents reported distraught children discovering they’d been shut out of platforms as the landmark law took effect, while some young children reported fooling the platforms’ age estimation technology by drawing on facial hair.

Communications Minister Anika Wells responded to reports of circumvention: “Just because they might have avoided it (detection) today doesn’t mean they will be able to avoid it in a week’s time or a month’s time because social media platforms have to go back and routinely check under-16 accounts”.

Wells also stated that the age-restricted platforms “may not agree with the law and that’s their right — we don’t expect 100% universal support,” but that all had undertaken to comply with the Australian law.

YouTube Issues Strong Criticism

YouTube published an official statement saying “this rushed regulation misunderstands our platform and the way young Australians use it. Most importantly, this law will not fulfill its promise to make kids safer online, and will, in fact, make Australian kids less safe on YouTube”.

The platform explained that because the law requires kids to use YouTube without an account, it “removes the very parental controls and safety filters built to protect them,” calling these “the unfortunate consequences of a rushed legislative process that failed to allow for adequate consultation and consideration of the real complexities of online safety regulation”.

Reddit Files High Court Challenge

US-based Reddit filed court documents challenging the validity of Australia’s social media ban law that “infringes the implied freedom of political communication,” calling for a review by Australia’s High Court.

Reddit argued that it should be exempt from the government’s list of banned platforms on the grounds that it is an online discussion forum aimed at adults, stating “Unlike other platforms included under this law, the vast majority of Redditors are adults, we don’t market or target advertising to children under 18. Simply put, users under 16 are not a substantial market segment for Reddit and we don’t intend them to be”.

The platform claims the law “has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences”.

“While we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts,” Reddit said.

Now Two Constitutional Challenges

Reddit’s suit follows a case filed last month by Sydney-based rights group Digital Freedom Project, with both suits claiming the law is unconstitutional because it infringes on Australia’s implied freedom of political communication.

The Digital Freedom Project filed proceedings with two 15-year-olds, Noah Jones and Macy Neyland, as plaintiffs, arguing the ban “robs” young Australians of their freedom of political communication, an implied right in the constitution.

The High Court will hold a preliminary hearing in late February 2026 to set a date for Digital Freedom Project’s challenge, though it is not yet clear whether the two challenges would be heard together.

Global Interest Intensifies

The New Zealand Government has promised regulatory change to address social media harm, with Education Minister Erica Stanford leading the work, and expects to introduce a bill this term addressing social media use among young people.

December 12, 2025: Reddit Files High Court Challenge

US-based Reddit filed court documents challenging the validity of Australia’s social media ban law that “infringes the implied freedom of political communication,” calling for a review by Australia’s High Court.

Reddit’s Main Arguments:

The platform’s challenge rests on two key points:

1. Reddit Isn’t Traditional Social Media

Reddit argued that it should be exempt from the government’s list of banned platforms on the grounds that it is an online discussion forum aimed at adults, stating “Unlike other platforms included under this law, the vast majority of Redditors are adults, we don’t market or target advertising to children under 18. Simply put, users under 16 are not a substantial market segment for Reddit and we don’t intend them to be”.

The platform emphasized “This law is applied to Reddit inaccurately, since we’re a forum primarily for adults and we don’t have the traditional social media features the government has taken issue with”.

2. Privacy and Age Verification Concerns

Reddit claims the law “has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences”.

Pointing to the site’s age rating of “17+” on the Apple App Store, Reddit said the best way to verify age was at the app store level rather than requiring each platform to carry out checks, with a spokesperson saying there were serious privacy concerns associated with platforms verifying age, as the collection of personal data creates a risk of leaks or hacks.

Reddit Will Still Comply

“While we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts,” Reddit said.

The platform elaborated: “Despite the best intentions, this law is missing the mark on actually protecting young people online. So, while we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts”.

Now Two Constitutional Challenges

Reddit’s suit follows a case filed last month by Sydney-based rights group Digital Freedom Project, with both suits claiming the law is unconstitutional because it infringes on Australia’s implied freedom of political communication.

The Digital Freedom Project filed proceedings in the High Court of Australia with two 15-year-olds, Noah Jones and Macy Neyland, as plaintiffs in the case, arguing the ban “robs” young Australians of their freedom of political communication, an implied right in the constitution.

The High Court will hold a preliminary hearing in late February 2026 to set a date for Digital Freedom Project’s challenge, though it is not yet clear whether the two challenges would be heard together.

Australian media has reported that YouTube also threatened to launch a High Court challenge on the grounds that the ban burdened political communication.

Early Signs of Circumvention

The rollout is already facing challenges, with many young people posting on TikTok that they successfully evaded the age limitations.

Professor Terry Flew of the University of Sydney noted “there’s a fair amount of teething problems around it,” acknowledging “you were never going to get 100% disappearance of every person under the age of 16 from every one of the designated platforms on day one”.

Teenagers are seeking alternatives, with photo-sharing platform Yope reporting 100,000 new Australian users and TikTok-owned Lemon8 surging into the top 10 most-downloaded apps.

This trend confirms concerns raised by critics before the ban’s implementation. David Inserra of the Cato Institute warned that children would evade the policy by shifting to new platforms, private apps like Telegram, or VPNs, driving them to “more isolated communities and platforms with fewer protections” where monitoring is harder.

Government Response

An Australian government spokesperson said Friday authorities were “on the side of Australian parents and kids, not platforms,” stating “We will stand firm to protect young Australians from experiencing harm on social media”.

Platform Concerns

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, raised concerns that teens could flock to darker, less regulated corners of the internet seeking connection with peers.

High-Profile Support

Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, said the ban is an urgent intervention that will help shield children from “unsafe and addictive platforms”, but argued it’s only a band-aid fix and does not tackle underlying issues with social media.

December 10, 2025: Ban Takes Effect

Australia became the first country to enforce a nationwide ban preventing users under 16 from accessing major social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, X, Reddit, and Threads.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described it as about “giving kids a childhood” and putting tech giants on notice, stating young Australians are “starting their day a little differently — without social media”.

Accounts Removed

Meta began removing accounts on December 4, 2025, affecting approximately 350,000 Instagram users and 150,000 Facebook users aged 13-15, giving users time to download their content before the December 10 deadline.

Evidence Behind the Decision

A government-commissioned study found 96% of Australian children aged 10 to 15 use social media, with seven in ten reporting exposure to harmful content including misogynistic material, fight videos, and content promoting eating disorders or suicide, and one in seven experiencing grooming-type behaviour from adults or older children.

UNICEF Australia backed the decision, calling the ban essential to protecting children from escalating risks of cyberbullying, harmful content, online predators, and mental-health damage linked to early social media exposure.

Critics’ Concerns

UNICEF cautioned that age-related restrictions alone won’t keep children safe, warning in a statement that “while UNICEF welcomes the growing commitment to children’s online safety, social media bans come with their own risks, and they may even backfire”.

The organization explained that for many children, particularly those who are isolated or marginalised, social media is a lifeline for learning, connection, play and self-expression, and many will still access social media through workarounds, shared devices, or less regulated platforms, which will only make it harder to protect them.

Public Support

Polling from December 2025 shows 70% of Australian voters endorse the ban and 15% oppose its aims, though 58% were not confident the ban would work compared to 33% who were fully confident.

The majority (53%) of voters aim to pick and choose which platforms to allow their child to use, with 29% intending full compliance and 13% taking no action.

Background: How the Ban Works

The Law’s Requirements

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 requires ten platforms to take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent under-16s from creating or keeping accounts, with platforms facing fines of up to A$49.5 million (approximately £26 million) for non-compliance.

Critically, parents and children face no penalties for attempting to circumvent the restrictions as the burden falls entirely on tech companies. There are no parental consent exceptions to the ban.

Which Platforms Are Covered

The ban currently applies to:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Reddit
  • Snapchat
  • TikTok
  • X (formerly Twitter)
  • YouTube
  • Threads
  • Twitch
  • Kick

Exempted Platforms

Services used for healthcare and education such as Messenger Kids, WhatsApp, Kids Helpline and Google Classroom are exempt.

Notably, gaming platform Roblox will not be banned, though the eSafety Commissioner has stated “there will not be a static list” of platforms due to changing services and technology.

Age Verification Technology

A report by Age Check Certification Scheme, a UK company recruited to consult on age verification technology, was issued in June 2025, ahead of the December deadline, with tech companies warning about inaccuracies in age-verification technology such as selfie-based age-guessing software.

What to Watch For

Near Term:

  • Reddit continues compliance while awaiting court proceedings
  • Preliminary hearing for the Digital Freedom Project case in late February 2026
  • Ongoing monitoring of circumvention methods and platform migration
  • Potential YouTube High Court challenge

Medium Term:

  • High Court rulings on constitutional challenges (timeline unclear)
  • Potential addition or removal of platforms from the banned list
  • Assessment of the ban’s effectiveness in protecting young people

Global Implications:

The policy rollout in Australia is being closely watched by tech firms and lawmakers worldwide as other countries including Denmark, Norway, Malaysia, and New Zealand consider their own moves to ban or restrict teen social media usage.

Sources:

Australia is trying to enforce the first teen social media ban – CNBC

“By banning social media for under 16, we’re giving children a childhood,” says Australian PM Albanese – Open Magazine

Australia Bans Under-16s From TikTok, Instagram, YouTube – IBTimes

Social media: Age-related bans won’t keep kids safe, UNICEF warns – UN News

Instagram can now read your teen’s private messages

Heidi Stenning
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0
Instagram can now read your teen’s private messages

Instagram can now read your teen’s private messages

Instagram direct messages are no longer end-to-end encrypted. As of 8 May 2026, the privacy layer that meant only the sender and the recipient could read a message has been removed from Instagram entirely. Meta can now technically access the content of every DM, image, voice note and video sent through the app. The change applied to all users with no in-app notification beyond a quietly updated support page in March.

This is one of the most significant privacy rollbacks Meta has made in years, and most users have not heard about it.

What actually changed

End-to-end encryption is the feature that means a message is unreadable to anyone except the two people in the conversation. Not the platform. Not the company. Not anyone the company shares data with. Instagram offered this as an opt-in feature for direct messages from 2023 onwards, although it was never the default and required users to enable it conversation by conversation through a buried setting.

That option no longer exists. Every Instagram DM is now stored on Meta’s servers in a form the company can read. Meta has confirmed it may use this access for content moderation, safety features, AI development, and responding to legal requests.

For users who had encrypted chats before 8 May, those messages are still encrypted but cannot be added to. New messages in those threads are unencrypted.

The reason Meta gave, and the reason it probably did it

Meta’s official explanation is that too few users had opted in to encrypted chats to justify keeping the feature. A spokesperson told The Guardian in March: “very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram.”

Low adoption is a defensible reason in isolation. It is also, on its own, an incomplete picture.

Eleven days after the removal of encryption, on 19 May 2026, the Take It Down Act came into force in the United States. The law requires online platforms to remove non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated deepfakes, within 48 hours of receiving a takedown notice. A platform cannot comply with a takedown notice for content it cannot see. Encryption made compliance impossible. Removing it makes compliance possible.

Meta has not explicitly linked the two events. Independent analysts and security researchers have. The timing is too clean to be coincidence.

There is also a longer-term commercial logic. Meta is investing heavily in AI development, and AI models are trained on data. Encrypted messages are data the company cannot use. Unencrypted messages are. Meta says DMs are not currently used for ad targeting and has not committed to using them for AI training, but neither commitment is binding and both leave room for future change.

The genuine safety argument

There is a real argument on the other side of this. The NSPCC, the Internet Watch Foundation and other child safety organisations have long argued that end-to-end encryption shields predators from detection. Grooming, the sharing of child sexual abuse material, and coordinated abuse have all been documented as happening inside encrypted channels precisely because they cannot be moderated. When Meta announced the removal, the NSPCC welcomed the change.

That argument is genuine, and parents who are worried about contact risks to their children may find the trade-off acceptable. The point of this piece is not to argue that encryption is more important than child safety. The point is that the trade-off is real, and parents should understand what was traded away.

What was traded away: every Instagram DM your teen sends is now readable by Meta, by anyone Meta shares it with under legal request or commercial partnership, and potentially by future systems Meta has not yet built or disclosed. That includes ordinary conversations, private photos sent between friends, voice notes, and anything else exchanged through the app.

What this means for you right now

This is a conversation, not a setting. There is no toggle to turn encryption back on. There is no app update that will restore it. The useful thing is a short, direct talk with your teen about what changed and what it means.

The talk has three parts.

Instagram DMs were never truly private, and now they are definitively not. Anything your teen would not want a stranger, a company, a future employer, or a future partner to read should not live in there. Private things go to genuinely private channels. If a message contains anything that could be embarrassing if read aloud, that message should not be on Instagram.

For genuinely private chat, there are better options. Signal keeps end-to-end encryption on by default for every conversation. It is free, it works on iOS and Android, and it is the messaging app most security researchers and journalists use. WhatsApp is also still end-to-end encrypted by default, although it is owned by Meta and the longer-term trajectory is uncertain. Apple’s iMessage is encrypted between Apple users but not when messaging Android phones.

The bigger lesson outlasts any single platform. Assume the DM is not a diary. This is true on Instagram now, and it is the safer default to apply everywhere. Platforms change their privacy positions when the commercial or regulatory pressure shifts. The only way to be certain a conversation is private is to have it on a platform whose business model does not depend on accessing the content of the conversation.

What to expect next

Meta has not committed to a timeline for how long DM content will be retained, how it might be used for moderation or AI training, or whether DMs could eventually be used for ad targeting. None of these are ruled out.

Other platforms are watching. TikTok already does not offer end-to-end encryption for DMs and has cited safety considerations. Snapchat does not encrypt messages by default. The trajectory across the major teen platforms is away from encrypted messaging, not towards it. The Instagram change is the most significant single step in that direction so far, but it will not be the last.

Sources:

After Molly Russell, Pinterest did the work most platforms still won’t

Heidi Stenning
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After Molly Russell, Pinterest did the work most platforms still won’t

Pinterest is the platform most associated with teen-girl harm in the UK. In 2022 a coroner ruled that content from Pinterest contributed to the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing thousands of pins about depression, self-harm, and suicide. The senior coroner for north London described the material as not safe for a child to see. Pinterest’s own head of community operations agreed under oath that the platform was not safe at the time.

Today the Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard adds Pinterest to its ratings of 21 apps. Pinterest averages 2.5, which puts it in the high-risk band, tied with Facebook, between Snapchat and Discord. It is not the worst platform on the scorecard. It is not even close to the worst. The platforms with the lowest scores are Kick at 1.2, Reddit and X at 1.5, and Twitch at 1.8.

The platform with the most consequential UK child-safety case attached to its name is in the middle of the scorecard, not at the bottom. The reason is that after Molly Russell’s inquest, Pinterest did substantial work that most other platforms still have not done.

What changed at Pinterest after 2017

The Molly Russell inquest lasted two weeks in autumn 2022. Pinterest and Meta were both ordered to give evidence. Judson Hoffman, Pinterest’s head of community operations, told the court the platform was not safe when Molly used it. Coroner Andrew Walker concluded that the negative effects of online content contributed to her death “in a more than minimal way.”

Pinterest was named in the coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths report, along with Meta, Snapchat, and Twitter. Each platform had until 8 December 2022 to set out what action they would take.

In the years since, Pinterest has done more than the others. A short list of the structural changes the platform has made:

Under-16 accounts are private by default. The under-16 profile begins as a temporary three-day link until the teen has earned five followers. Messaging is restricted to mutual followers only. Comments are off by default for everyone under 18.

Direct messaging was paused entirely after the Molly Russell case and reintroduced cautiously, with consent requirements. A parental passcode was added in 2024, allowing parents to lock changes to their teen’s settings for messaging, privacy, and account management.

Weight-loss adverts were banned in 2021, the first major platform to do so. Body-type filters were added to women’s fashion and beauty searches, returning results that include a variety of body shapes, including disabled bodies. The same was not added to men’s fashion. Unlike Instagram and TikTok, Pinterest does not allow beauty filters at all.

The Molly Rose Foundation, set up by Molly Russell’s family to push for child online safety, analysed Digital Services Act transparency data from six major platforms (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and X) in early 2025. Their conclusion was that most major platforms were “substantially failing to respond to the risk profile of their products.” Pinterest was the one platform they singled out as “notably” investing in proactive identification and removal of suicide and self-harm content.

That endorsement from that foundation is the strongest possible signal of how the platform has changed. It does not absolve Pinterest of what happened in 2017. But it tells parents something important: the platform Molly Russell used and the platform a 14-year-old would use today are not the same product.

What still isn’t fixed

The algorithm is the same algorithm. Pinterest is fundamentally a more-like-this engine. A teen who searches for “fitness inspiration” or “diet” is one or two clicks from disordered-eating content. A teen who searches “self-care” or “depression” can find pins that romanticise low mood and self-harm. Pinterest’s own most recent EU transparency report acknowledged removing 1.1 million pins for self-injury content in a single four-month period. That is evidence both that enforcement is happening and that there is a lot to enforce.

Pinterest’s content risk on the Wired Parents Scorecard is rated 2 out of 4, which is high risk. The platform’s structural design has not changed. The default user experience is to keep showing more of whatever the user has shown interest in, and the platform’s algorithm cannot easily distinguish between a teen who loves art deco design and a teen whose interest in art deco design is bound up with deeper distress.

For most children using Pinterest, the platform is what it appears to be: a tool for finding outfit inspiration, planning birthday parties, gathering recipes, building mood boards. For a small but real group of vulnerable children, particularly teen girls already experiencing mental health difficulties, the same algorithm becomes something else. The Wired Parents rating reflects both realities.

The data practices are also standard-aggressive. Pinterest shares user information with third parties for their own purposes. Users’ activity on Pinterest is used to target advertising on other sites. Pinterest uses user data to train AI models. Teens in the UK and EU are opted out of personalised advertising by default. Teens elsewhere are not. The privacy category scores 2 out of 4. Better than Meta or TikTok. Not meaningfully restrained.

Pinterest has no Family Center equivalent. The 2024 parental passcode locks settings, but it is not a supervision tool. There is no way for a parent to link to a teen’s Pinterest account, see what they are pinning, see who they are following, or get alerts. Parental controls score 3, which is better than the platforms that have nothing at all (Reddit, Twitch, Kick, X) but well behind Instagram’s 4.

What this means for the scorecard

The Wired Parents recommended age for Pinterest is 16+. That comes from the methodology, which maps the platform’s six-category average to an age band. An average of 2.5 sits in the 16+ band.

This will be higher than many parents expect, especially parents who think of Pinterest as a benign craft and inspiration platform. The case for 16+ is straightforward: the algorithm-driven content risk for vulnerable teens is real, and the platform offers no parent-side supervision. A 13-year-old can sign up to Pinterest with no parental knowledge, search for anything they want, and a parent has no tools to see what they are doing.

The case for a younger recommended age is also fair: Pinterest’s default safety settings for under-16s are genuinely good, the platform’s improvements since 2017 are substantial, and the bullying environment is materially lower-risk than Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. The platform’s own minimum age is 13, and Common Sense Media rates it 13+.

Our recommended age is 16+ rather than 13+ because the content-risk concern for vulnerable teen girls specifically is severe even if the platform-average risk is moderate. We would rather flag the risk and have parents decide, than under-rate the platform and have parents not flag the conversation at all.

How Pinterest compares to other platforms

In the scorecard’s middle band of social platforms, Pinterest sits alongside Facebook, Discord, and Instagram. All four are platforms where the answer to “should my teen be on this?” depends heavily on engagement: which features are turned on, which controls the parent has set up, what conversations have happened at home.

The platforms with much worse scores than Pinterest are the ones where engagement does not help much. Reddit has no parental controls at all and the UK regulator fined the company £14.47m in February 2026 for unlawfully processing children’s data. Kick is owned by the same parent company as the crypto-gambling site Stake.com and publishes no transparency reports. X has dismantled its trust and safety operation. Twitch has no built-in parental controls and a long history of grooming cases.

Pinterest is not in that company. It has done the work, and the work shows up in the ratings. The question of whether your teen should use it is still a question worth asking, but it is a different question from whether your teen should use Kick or Reddit.

What to do as a parent

Three concrete steps if your child uses Pinterest, in order of priority.

Set up the parental passcode. This is the single most useful action available. With a passcode in place, your teen cannot change their messaging settings, account privacy, or content preferences without it. The passcode is set within your teen’s account, not yours, so you will need to do it with them. Pinterest’s help center explains the process. Without the passcode, every default setting can be reversed by the teen at any time.

Have a specific conversation about the algorithm. Not a general internet safety conversation. A specific one about how Pinterest’s algorithm works. Tell them that the platform shows more of whatever they engage with, and that engagement includes scrolling past slowly, lingering on an image, or saving a pin. Tell them that if their feed starts to make them feel worse rather than better, the algorithm has not noticed. They have to notice. The action is to actively engage with different content (food, animals, hobbies, anything neutral) or to use the option to hide pins they don’t want to see.

Pay attention to their boards, not their pins. A teenager’s secret board on Pinterest is the digital equivalent of a notebook they keep in a drawer. You don’t need to read every pin. But if your teen has stopped showing you what they’re working on, and previously did, that is worth a conversation. Coroner Andrew Walker’s report after the Molly Russell inquest specifically called for parents to have access to material their children view, with appropriate retention. Pinterest does not offer that access. The conversation has to do the work that the platform doesn’t.

Why this rating matters

Wired Parents rates platforms on the evidence available, not on the reputation a platform carries. Pinterest’s reputation is largely defined by 2017. The platform’s reality in 2026 is different. Both can be true.

The reason for adding Pinterest to the scorecard now is precisely because the gap between reputation and current reality is unusually wide. Parents who avoid Pinterest because of what they have heard about it may be missing a useful platform their teen would benefit from. Parents who let their teen use Pinterest because they have heard nothing recent about it may be missing real risks the platform still carries.

The scorecard is meant to do the work of separating those two things. Pinterest’s score is 2.5, average among social platforms, and the work the platform has done since 2017 is real. The work the platform still has to do is also real. Both numbers belong on the card.

See Pinterest on the Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard →

Sources

Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard

Molly Russell inquest verdict, BBC News, 30 September 2022

Molly Russell coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths report, October 2022

Molly Rose Foundation: How effectively do social networks moderate suicide and self-harm content? January 2025

Pinterest DSA Transparency Report (most recent)

Pinterest Global Transparency Report

Pinterest teen safety options

Common Sense Media: Pinterest review, November 2025

How to read an official warning about your child’s screen time, without taking it on trust

Heidi Stenning
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0
How to read an official warning about your child’s screen time, without taking it on trust

On 20 May 2026, the US Department of Health and Human Services published a 43-page document titled “Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use.” The headlines that followed, in news outlets from London to New York to Sydney, were broadly the same: official US health body says children’s screens are dangerous, parents must act. If you live anywhere in the world and you are even loosely paying attention to the conversation about children and technology, you almost certainly saw at least one version of that headline this week.

Here is the more useful story. The document is not quite what it appears, and learning to see why is going to matter to you for a long time. Documents like this one, from governments around the world, are going to keep arriving. The UK has a consultation closing this week that will produce one. The EU will publish proposals later this year. Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines and Nigeria all have processes underway. Parents who can read these documents critically will be far better equipped than parents who simply trust the headline.

So this piece is about that. Use the new US advisory as the worked example. The lessons travel.

Six things worth knowing about the new US advisory

The Surgeon General did not write it. The Office of the Surgeon General has not had a Surgeon General since January 2025. President Trump’s two nominees have been pulled. The document was authored by a leadership team at HHS, the department now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The cover says “Surgeon General’s Warning” but no Surgeon General signed it.

It was not peer reviewed. The document itself acknowledges this. “The findings in this document are not the result of a formal systematic review.” A peer review is the normal quality control for any document carrying the weight of an official health warning. This one skipped it.

It was edited by a chatbot. The methodology note states: “HHS ChatGPT-5.3 was used for text editing purposes.” A federal health advisory warning parents about the dangers of AI chatbots to children was edited by an AI chatbot. The disclosure is in the document but it has been almost entirely absent from news coverage.

It contains at least one significant statistical error. A full-page graphic on page 15 claims that nearly 5 out of 10 teenagers have experienced cyberbullying. The paper cited as the source for that figure does not contain that statistic. The paper draws on the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the largest US dataset of its kind, which reports that 16% of high school students were electronically bullied in the past year. Sixteen per cent is a real number worth taking seriously. Nearly fifty per cent is something else. Jacqueline Nesi, a clinical psychologist at Brown University who studies adolescents and technology, identified the error in a careful analysis published on 26 May.

It conflates two different ideas of “harm.” Near the start, the advisory says screen effects “depend on multiple factors, such as a child’s age, the types of screen use, the content viewed, the context of intended purpose, and what screen time may displace.” This is the honest summary of what the research shows. Then the document spends four pages on a bulleted list of “Negative Impacts of Screen Use,” presenting cross-sectional correlations as if they were established harms. Whitney Raglin Bignall of the Kids Mental Health Foundation, speaking to EdSurge, put it plainly: research has found a correlation between screen time and poor mental health, but there is not yet cause-and-effect evidence.

It is wrapped in a political campaign. The advisory states it “seeks to build on the framework established by First Lady Melania Trump’s Be Best campaign.” It carries a “Live Real Life” slogan that gets its own full-page graphic. The slogan parallels Kennedy’s earlier “Eat Real Food” branding under the Make America Healthy Again strategic plan. Whatever you think of that political programme, a public health document branded inside a political campaign should be read differently from a public health document that is not.

What experts who study this for a living are saying

The substantive critique above is not coming from cranks or from anyone with a political motivation to dismiss the document. It is coming from researchers who have spent their careers in this field.

Andrew Przybylski at the Oxford Internet Institute has published more than a decade of peer-reviewed work showing that the effects of screen time on children are smaller and more conditional than the public conversation suggests. His co-author Amy Orben at Cambridge has reached similar conclusions. Nesi at Brown writes the most widely-read evidence-led newsletter for parents on this subject. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which used to publish strict time limits, updated its own guidance in 2025 to move away from time limits and toward family media plans organised around content, context and what the screen is displacing.

Reasonable researchers do not say screens are fine and you should stop worrying. They say the picture is more complicated than the headlines, the evidence is mostly associational rather than causal, and the right questions are about what children are doing on the screen, not how many minutes they spend on it. That is a less dramatic message than “warning on the harms of screen use.” It is also closer to the truth.

The lesson that lasts

Governments around the world are about to publish a great many documents about children and technology. Some will be careful, evidence-led and useful. Others will be campaign material with a public health wrapper. They will be hard to tell apart at a glance, because both kinds will use the same official letterhead.

One habit is worth knowing about. In 2017, researchers at Stanford University compared how three groups read unfamiliar sources online: historians, undergraduate students, and professional fact-checkers. The fact-checkers were noticeably better at evaluating credibility, and they did one thing the other two groups did not. They did not read the source more carefully. They clicked away from it and opened new tabs to see what other credible people said about the document, the institution, and the claims. The Stanford team called this lateral reading. It is now standard practice in professional fact-checking organisations and is taught as part of digital media literacy in many schools.

For a parent reading “Surgeon General Warns” in the morning, lateral reading means spending ten minutes finding what independent researchers say about it, before acting on the headline. Not the document itself. Not the news coverage that quotes the document. Search for the names of academic researchers in the field and see whether they are quoted approving, criticising, or absent.

Ten minutes of lateral reading on the new US advisory would have led to Nesi at Brown, Raglin Bignall at the Kids Mental Health Foundation, Przybylski at Oxford, Orben at Cambridge, and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2025 revision. The same habit will work for the next advisory, from whichever government publishes it.

Sources:

What changed on Snap, Meta and Roblox this week — and what TikTok and YouTube refused to change

Heidi Stenning
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What changed on Snap, Meta and Roblox this week — and what TikTok and YouTube refused to change

On 21 May 2026, the UK regulator Ofcom told the public which big platforms had agreed to make children safer, and which had not. Snap, Meta and Roblox have committed to specific changes. TikTok and YouTube refused to change how their feeds push content to children, claiming their algorithms are already safe.

This is the report Ofcom said was coming when it wrote to the six biggest platforms used by children back in March. It is the first time a regulator has published a platform-by-platform scorecard of what each company will and will not do to protect children, and it gives parents a clearer picture than they have ever had of which apps are moving and which are digging in.

What the regulator asked for

In March, Ofcom wrote to Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snap, TikTok and YouTube with four demands. Stop letting children under the official minimum age use the service. Add stronger protections against grooming. Make the algorithmic feeds that push content to children safer. And stop testing new features on children before checking the risks.

The deadline for responses was the end of April. The regulator has now published what each platform said it would do.

What each platform agreed to, and what they refused

Snap agreed to the most concrete set of changes. Adults will be blocked from contacting children on Snapchat by default. Children will no longer be prompted to add people they do not know to expand their friendship groups. Snap also told the regulator it will roll out age assurance to all UK users over the summer, so the protections apply to every under-18 account, not just the ones where the platform already knows the user is a child. Snap has been identified in research over several years as one of the highest-risk services for grooming, which is why the default setting change matters: it shifts the burden away from the child needing to block strangers and onto the platform needing to let strangers through.

Meta agreed to use AI to detect sexualised conversations between adults and teenagers in Instagram direct messages, and to report flagged accounts to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. It will hide teenagers’ followers and following lists by default, so adults cannot use those lists to find and contact children they do not know. Meta is also extending its “13+ movie style” sensitive content control from Instagram to Facebook, limiting what teenagers see to age-appropriate posts. What Meta did not agree to was Ofcom’s measure that would have stopped Instagram from suggesting connections between children and people they do not know. The regulator wanted Instagram to switch off “people you may know” prompts for children entirely. Meta declined.

Roblox confirmed that parents will be able to switch off direct messaging entirely for children under 16. The platform is also rolling out the new Roblox Kids and Roblox Select accounts in June. Children aged 5 to 8 will get Roblox Kids accounts with all communications features off by default, and 9-to-15-year-olds will get Roblox Select accounts with stricter chat and content settings depending on age. These changes were already announced in April, but Ofcom has now secured the commitment in writing.

TikTok and YouTube refused. Ofcom asked both platforms to set out how they would make their algorithmic feeds, the For You feed on TikTok and the recommendations on YouTube, safer for children. The deadline was the end of April. Neither company committed to any significant change. Both insisted their feeds are already safe for children. Ofcom’s own research, published the same day, found that 73% of 11 to 17 year olds had encountered harmful content online in a single four-week window, and that the platforms children encounter the most harm on are the ones with the biggest reach. TikTok was the platform most frequently named. Ofcom said it is “deeply concerned” by the response and signalled it will use stronger powers under the Online Safety Act to force changes, including the power to require independent reviews of how each platform’s systems actually work.

What this means for you right now

The Snapchat default changes only protect children whose accounts the platform knows are under 18. If your child has a Snapchat account, check that the date of birth on the account is correct. Open Snapchat. Tap the profile icon (top-left). Tap the settings cog (top-right). Tap “Name, Birthday & Birthday Party”. If the year is wrong because your child signed up with a fake birthday, the new protections will not apply to them.

On Instagram, the new AI detection in DMs will run whether you do anything or not. But the followers and following lists will only be hidden if Meta switches the default for your child’s account. Check that your child’s Instagram account is set as a Teen Account. Open Instagram, go to Settings, then “Account type and tools”. If the account is not flagged as a Teen Account, the new protections will not apply.

On Roblox, the option to switch off direct messaging will need to be turned on by you through the Parental Controls. It will not switch on automatically for existing accounts. If your child is under 16 and you would rather they did not message strangers on Roblox, this is the setting to find. Settings → Parental Controls → Communication.

On TikTok and YouTube, nothing has changed and nothing is changing. The platforms have told the regulator their feeds are already safe. The regulator disagrees. The available family controls, TikTok’s Family Pairing and YouTube’s supervised account experience, remain the most useful tools you have, and both are worth setting up if you have not already.

The regulator has taken the unusual step of publishing exactly which platforms moved and which did not. That clarity is worth using.

Sources:

We’ve rebuilt the Wired Parents Scorecard

Heidi Stenning
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We’ve rebuilt the Wired Parents Scorecard

In April 2026 the Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard rated 16 apps against six categories on a 1 to 4 scale. This week it has been rebuilt. Four new platforms now sit on the scorecard. A seventh category, bullying, has been added. And for every platform on the page, we now publish our own recommended age, based on the evidence, alongside the platform’s own stated minimum.

The shortest summary: if Australia thought a platform was unsafe enough to ban for under-16s, parents can now look it up on the scorecard. If a platform claims it is suitable for a 13-year-old but the evidence says otherwise, the scorecard says so plainly.

Four new platforms

The four additions are Reddit, Threads, Twitch, and Kick. All four appear on Australia’s banned-for-under-16s list, which came into effect in December 2025. None of them had been mainstream parent-safety territory until recently. All four are now widely used by UK teens.

Reddit is rated 17+ in the Apple App Store, higher than TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office fined Reddit £14.47 million in February 2026 for unlawfully processing under-13s’ data, the largest children’s privacy penalty the regulator has ever issued. There are no built-in parental controls. Direct messages are on by default for every account.

Threads sits inside Meta’s ecosystem and benefits from Instagram’s safety rules, but with weaker protections than Instagram itself. From November 2025, Instagram’s Family Center supervision no longer extends to Threads. Meta’s May 2026 consolidated Family Center, announced last week, covers Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Meta Horizon, but pointedly not Threads.

Twitch publishes more transparency data than most platforms but has a long, documented predator problem. Bloomberg’s 2022 investigation found a 1,125 per cent increase in NCMEC reports about Twitch between 2019 and 2021. There are no built-in parental controls.

Kick is the lowest-rated platform on the entire scorecard. Owned by the same parent company as the crypto-gambling site Stake.com, gambling streams are its number-one content category. In August 2025 a French streamer died on Kick during a 280-hour livestreamed broadcast that allegedly involved physical abuse. The French government has filed criminal proceedings against Kick. The platform publishes no transparency reports.

A new category: bullying

The original six categories cover the structural risks of each platform: what content gets through, who can contact your child, how their data is handled, what controls parents can use. They do not directly capture peer-on-peer harm, which is the risk most UK parents actually see in their own homes.

Bullying is the seventh category. Every social and gaming platform on the scorecard now has a bullying score and a note explaining where the risks sit. The AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Character.ai, Snapchat My AI) do not have a bullying score because they do not have peer contact.

Snapchat, X, and Kick are rated severe risk on bullying. Snapchat’s disappearing messages enable bullying without trace, leaving victims no evidence. X’s Trust and Safety dismantlement means mass pile-ons go unchecked. Kick has no published Youth Safety enforcement data at all.

WhatsApp is rated high risk on bullying despite being one of the safest platforms structurally. Group chats are where most teen bullying happens, and end-to-end encryption means parents cannot see the content.

Our own recommended age, not the platforms’

The third change is editorial. Every platform on the scorecard now shows two ages on its card: the platform’s own stated minimum (usually 13, set by US privacy law rather than by safety), and the Wired Parents recommended age, derived from our scorecard methodology.

The gap is sometimes wide. Reddit’s stated minimum is 13. Our recommendation is 18+. Kick’s stated minimum is 13 (16 in the EU). Our recommendation is also 18+. Instagram’s stated minimum is 13. Our recommendation is 16+, which aligns with Australia’s regulatory bar.

The full table of recommendations runs from Minecraft at 7+ to Kick, Reddit, X, and Character.ai at 18+. Every recommendation has reasoning behind it on the platform’s card.

What this means for you right now

Three things to do.

First, visit the scorecard and check each app your child uses. The recommended ages on the cards are derived from the same evidence parents have been asking us to weigh up for them. The number is on the card; the reasoning is in the notes.

Second, if your child uses Reddit, Twitch, or Kick, know that no parental controls exist. Account-level settings on these platforms can be reversed by the child. Oversight depends on the conversation you have, not on the tools you install.

Third, on the platforms where parental controls do exist (Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Discord, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp), set them up. From May 2026, Instagram lets parents see the topics shaping their teen’s algorithm. YouTube lets parents set the Shorts feed to zero. Family Center for Meta apps is now consolidated. The tools have improved meaningfully in the past year. The bottleneck is not the tools. It is parents knowing the tools exist.

The relaunched scorecard is live now. As always, ratings will evolve as platforms change.

Sources: Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard

eSafety Commissioner — age-restricted social media platforms

ICO — Reddit £14.47m fine, 24 February 2026

Meta — New Supervision Tools, 12 May 2026

Dublin City University — Recommending Toxicity report, 2024

Roblox just raised the age for its most popular games to 16

Heidi Stenning
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Roblox just raised the age for its most popular games to 16

Today, the minimum age to play Roblox’s roleplay rooms, free-draw rooms and chat-heavy social games quietly went up by three years. Anything Roblox classifies as a Social Hangout, a Free-form User Creation game, or a Sensitive Issues experience is now restricted to users who are 16 or older and have verified their age with ID. The threshold used to be 13.

This is the biggest single change to who can play what on Roblox since the platform introduced age checks at all. It affects some of the games children spend most of their time in — and Roblox has not done much to tell parents it is happening.

What changed today

Roblox already required an age check to access certain content categories from age 13. From 19 May, that age moves to 16, and the verification standard goes up with it: a government-issued ID or a credit-card check, not just a self-declared birthdate.

The three categories that have moved:

  • Social Hangouts — games whose main purpose is chatting and spending time with other players, rather than completing a goal. Roblox classifies many of the most popular roleplay rooms here.
  • Free-form User Creation — games built around players drawing, building or designing things together, often with open chat.
  • Sensitive Issues — content touching on topics Roblox flags as adult, including some narrative-heavy roleplay games.

A child who has not verified their age with ID is now treated as under 16 by default and cannot access these categories. A 14-year-old who logged off last night will, in most cases, find some of their favourite games unavailable today.

Why Roblox is doing this now

The change lines up with Roblox’s new account structure for younger users. Roblox Kids (ages 5–8) and Roblox Select (ages 9–15) launched earlier this month with tighter defaults on who children can chat with and which games they can access. Raising the age threshold for Social Hangouts, free-form rooms and sensitive content to 16 keeps the entire under-16 cohort — including the Select tier — out of those categories by design.

It also follows pressure on the platform from multiple directions: six US states have now filed lawsuits against Roblox alleging child-safety failures, Ofcom has the platform on its child-safety enforcement list in the UK, and Australia is investigating it under the under-16 social media ban. Tightening the age line on chat-heavy and creator-heavy content is the kind of move that addresses several of those pressures at once.

What this means for you right now

Check what your child can still play tonight. If you have a child aged 13 to 15 who plays Roblox regularly, open the app with them and look at what’s on their home screen. Games that have disappeared, that show an age-check prompt, or that ask for ID are the ones now affected. This is the most useful conversation prompt you’ll get all year about what your child has actually been playing.

Do not verify your child’s age with ID to get them back in. Roblox now lets users submit a government ID or credit card to prove they are 16+. If your child is under 16 and asks you to “just do the age check,” the answer is no. The age threshold exists because Roblox itself has decided this content is not suitable for under-16s. Verifying a real adult to unlock it defeats the change and puts your ID into Roblox’s system for a reason that doesn’t apply to your family.

Talk to your child about why this has happened. A child losing access to games they like will be upset, and they will frame this as Roblox being unfair. The honest answer is that Roblox is responding to court cases, regulators and concerned parents who said the content in these games is not appropriate for children. That is a real conversation worth having — about why these particular categories of game raised concerns in the first place.

If your child plays nothing in these three categories, nothing changes for them today. Most goal-based games, racing games, obstacle courses, and competitive games are unaffected. The change is targeted at chat-heavy and open-creation spaces, not at Roblox as a whole.

What is still missing

This change tightens the rules at the older end of childhood — moving 13-to-15-year-olds out of certain content. It does not change much for younger children, who were already covered by the Roblox Kids and Roblox Select restrictions. And it does not address the underlying questions about moderation inside the games that remain available: open chat in many games still relies on Roblox’s filters and reporting tools, not human moderation in real time.

This is one move in a much longer campaign Roblox is going to need to run.

Sources:

Instagram is showing parents the algorithm — but not the content

Heidi Stenning
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Instagram is showing parents the algorithm — but not the content

Meta has opened up a part of Instagram that used to be invisible to parents. From 12 May, parents who supervise a teen’s account can see the topic categories that the algorithm has built around their child. Not just how long they’ve been on the app, not just who they message — the actual interests Instagram thinks they have, and which it is now using to choose what they see next.

This is the first time a major platform has shown parents the inputs of the algorithm itself.

What changed on 12 May

Instagram already had a tool called Your Algorithm, launched last December, which lets users themselves see and adjust the topics shaping their Reels and Explore feeds. Adults have had it for months. Teens have it too.

What is new is that parents enrolled in supervision can now see the same list. Open Family Center, find your teen’s account, and the topic categories appear — basketball, photography, musicals, fashion, anime, fitness, and so on. Tap into a topic and you get more detail about what’s inside it.

In selected markets, parents will also start receiving notifications when their teen adds a new interest. So if a child adds “weight loss” or “skincare” or “true crime” to their algorithm, the parent will be told.

The feature is rolling out globally in English from today. Other languages will follow.

What this actually shows you (and what it doesn’t)

The list is the algorithm’s read of your child. It is not a content log. It tells you what categories Instagram has decided to optimise their feed around — not the specific posts they have liked, watched, paused on, or quietly searched for.

That distinction matters. A teen who has spent an hour watching content about a topic but has not engaged enough to register as “interested” may not show up. A category the algorithm decided to push because lots of accounts like theirs engage with it may show up even if your child has not particularly engaged.

It is also opt-in via the teen, in one important sense. Topics are a layer that teens themselves can edit, add to, and remove from. Your view as a parent is of the current state, not the history.

So: useful, but read it as a map of what Instagram is trying to do with your teen’s attention rather than as a transcript of what they have seen.

One Family Center for four apps

The second part of the announcement is more practical and less interesting. Parental controls for Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Meta Horizon (the VR platform) are now consolidated in a single Family Center hub. One invitation covers all four apps. A view across them is coming “in the coming months,” including aggregated time spent.

The VR inclusion is quietly significant. Meta Horizon supervision has been patchy and confusing for parents whose children use a Meta Quest headset. Bringing it into the same place as the social apps is overdue.

What this means for you right now

If you have not yet enrolled in supervision, do it this week. The number of US teens enrolled has more than doubled in a year, which means a meaningful share of parents are now in. The threshold is low — you send one invitation from familycenter.meta.com/supervision and your teen accepts. Without it, the topic insight does not appear.

When you can see the topics, look — but talk before you react. A category called “weight loss” or “depression” or “manosphere” sitting in your teen’s algorithm is information, not a verdict. Teens look at things out of curiosity, because their friends sent them, because the algorithm pushed them, or because they are genuinely interested. The point of the visibility is to give you a starting line for a conversation, not a reason to confiscate the phone.

Treat the notifications as a heads-up, not an alarm. If Meta tells you your teen has added a new interest, take it as a prompt to ask in the next few days, casually, what they have been watching lately. Not “I saw you added skincare.” Just: “anything good on Instagram this week?”

Don’t mistake this for content moderation. Meta is showing you what the algorithm is doing, not changing what your teen can see. The 13+ content protections built into Teen Accounts still do what they do — and don’t do what they don’t. If you have concerns about specific content, the response is still to talk, to adjust who can contact your teen, and where necessary to step back from the platform itself.

What is still missing

There is no view of who your teen is messaging with. There is no view of what they have searched. There is no view of the accounts they follow privately. And there is no equivalent feature for TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, or Roblox.

If you want algorithm transparency across the platforms your teen actually uses, Instagram is one of six. The other five have not opened the same window. Some of them are unlikely to without a regulator forcing the issue.

Sources:

The biggest study yet of school phone bans is in, and the wellbeing finding is what matters

Heidi Stenning
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The biggest study yet of school phone bans is in, and the wellbeing finding is what matters

A new US study tracked 4,600 secondary schools that brought in phone bans. The schools used Yondr pouches — small locking bags where the phone goes at the start of the day and stays until the end. Three years of data, published on 4 May 2026.

The study answers a simple question: when you take phones out of schools, what changes?

What changed

Kids felt better at school. Not straight away — wellbeing actually dipped for the first year as kids adjusted to the new rule. By year three, kids at the schools with bans were slightly happier at school than they had been before.

What didn’t change

Test scores stayed the same. Attendance stayed the same. Bullying stayed the same.

This last one surprised a lot of people. Schools and parents had hoped phone bans would reduce bullying. They didn’t. The reason is probably that most bullying now happens online, after school, in group chats parents and teachers can’t see. Locking the phone away during lessons doesn’t reach any of that.

What was hard

Year one was rough. Kids resisted the new rule. Suspensions went up 16%. Most of the resistance had faded by year three.

What this means for you right now

If your child’s school has just brought a phone ban in and your child is furious about it — making the atmosphere at home miserable, telling you the rule is stupid, fighting about it daily — the data says this is normal for year one. It eases. By the end of the second year most kids stop pushing back. By year three they’re happier at school than they were before the rule existed.

If a school is selling a phone ban as a fix for grades or bullying, the evidence doesn’t support that. If it’s selling it as something that slowly improves how kids feel about being at school, the evidence does.

Phone bans in schools are spreading. The UK made them statutory on 29 April. Several US states and Australian state governments have rolled them out in the last year. France, the Netherlands and parts of Canada have moved the same way. If your child’s school doesn’t have a phone rule yet, the conversation is probably coming.

The next study to watch is the one Ofcom has commissioned on the first year of the UK’s Online Safety Act, due alongside its platform-response report this month.

The EU just put a social media age limit on the table

Heidi Stenning
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The EU just put a social media age limit on the table

The EU just put a social media age limit on the table

The European Commission could propose an EU-wide social media age limit for children as early as this summer. That is what Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission’s President, told delegates at the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children in Copenhagen on 12 May 2026. It is the clearest signal yet that one of the world’s biggest regulators is moving towards the same kind of restriction Australia introduced in December 2025.

For parents anywhere in the world, this matters less because of what the EU does in its own borders and more because of what it tells you about where the platforms your child uses are heading.

What von der Leyen actually said

Von der Leyen said the Commission is waiting for findings from its Special Panel of experts on Child Safety Online, but added: “Without pre-empting the panel’s findings, I believe we must consider a social media delay. Depending on the results, we could come forward with a legal proposal this summer.”

She also said discussions about a minimum age for social media “can no longer be ignored.” That is a significant shift in tone from a Commission that, until now, has stopped short of endorsing age-based bans and preferred to focus on platform duties.

Two other things from the speech matter:

The EU’s age-verification app is technically ready. Built on the same model as the Digital COVID Certificate and using a method that confirms whether someone is above an age threshold without revealing their identity, it has been formally recommended to member states. Apple and Google have been instructed to integrate it at the operating-system level.

The Digital Fairness Act, expected later this year, targets a separate problem: how platforms are designed to keep users scrolling. The proposed law would restrict what von der Leyen called “addictive design”: endless scroll that never gives you a stopping point, autoplay that starts the next video before you decide to keep watching, push notifications engineered to pull you back into the app. None of these are illegal now. The Digital Fairness Act would make them regulated, with platforms required to remove or limit them.

This is separate from the age question. It would apply to every user, but children are most affected because they have the least ability to resist these patterns. She named TikTok directly.

Where this fits with everything else

The EU is not acting in isolation. Australia’s under-16 ban came into force five months ago. France approved an under-15 ban in January 2026. Spain, Denmark, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, and Ireland are all drafting national rules. The European Parliament has separately called for a uniform 16-year minimum across the bloc.

Meanwhile, the Commission has open investigations against Meta, TikTok, X, and Snap under the Digital Services Act, focused on how those platforms handle minors. Some are expected to produce findings within the next twelve months.

Why this matters wherever you live

The EU is one of the largest single markets in the world for the platforms your child uses. When the EU passes a rule that affects how Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, or X serve minors, those platforms rarely build a separate product for every jurisdiction. The default tends to become global, because running parallel systems is expensive. This is what happened with the GDPR. It is what is now happening with the Digital Services Act.

That does not mean a global under-16 ban is coming. It means the rules in the largest single market are moving from “platforms must mitigate risks to children” towards “platforms must keep children off.” If you have been watching Australia and wondering whether what’s happening there is an outlier, this week’s news suggests it is not.

What to do this week

Check what’s already there. Before the platforms change anything in response to this, get familiar with the parental controls and teen settings that already exist on the apps your child uses: Instagram’s Teen Accounts, TikTok’s Family Pairing, Snapchat’s Family Centre, YouTube’s supervised accounts, Roblox’s parental controls. If the Digital Fairness Act passes, the defaults will likely shift. Knowing the starting point makes the changes easier to spot.

Watch the Digital Fairness Act separately. The age limit is the headline. The Digital Fairness Act is the substance. It is more likely to land first, and it would change how the platforms your child uses actually work, not who is allowed on them.

Use this as a conversation prompt. “Why do you think governments are talking about banning social media for kids?” is a useful question for a child aged ten and up. The answer should not start with “because it’s bad for you.” It should start with “what do you think?” Children who already use these platforms have views worth hearing before any rule reaches them.

What’s still unknown

The expert panel’s findings have not been published. The age threshold is unconfirmed: the European Parliament wants 16, but the Commission has not committed to a number. The Digital Fairness Act’s final scope is still being worked out. Any legal proposal would still need to pass through the EU’s legislative process, which is rarely fast.

Expect platform announcements over the summer. Meta did this in 2024 with Teen Accounts. Roblox is doing it now. Some of what arrives will contain real changes worth knowing about. We’ll keep tracking it.

Sources: European Commission — Keynote address by President von der Leyen at the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children, 12 May 2026

Euronews — Von der Leyen opens door to EU-wide social media ban for children, 12 May 2026

The Next Web — Ursula von der Leyen pushes EU-wide social-media age protections for children, 12 May 2026

An eyebrow pencil, the Online Safety Act, and the case for going further

Heidi Stenning
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An eyebrow pencil, the Online Safety Act, and the case for going further

The UK’s Online Safety Act has been in force for four months. Since 17 January, the largest platforms have had to keep children off pornography and content promoting suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, verify users’ ages, and change their algorithms so harmful content isn’t recommended to under-18s. Non-compliance carries fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global revenue.

The first proper research on whether it’s working dropped on 1 May. The findings: the law is doing some of what it was supposed to, none of what it wasn’t, and the things parents are most worried about aren’t in the Act yet. That last bit is what the consultation closing on 26 May is set up to address.

What the research found

Internet Matters surveyed parents and children and ran seven focus groups in February. Two thirds of parents and children say they are seeing more safety features on the apps they use. Just over half of children have been asked to verify their age recently. Around 54% of children say the content they see online is now more child-friendly.

The verification side is the awkward bit. Nearly half of children think age checks are easy to bypass. A third say they have done it. In one focus group, a mother described catching her son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face; the platform’s age check estimated him at 15. A quarter of parents say they have allowed their child to bypass age checks.

What the research found about what parents actually want

Internet Matters asked parents and children what they were most worried about. The two things that came up most often were not in the Act at all: the amount of time children spend online, and the rise of AI-generated content that children can’t tell apart from real images and videos.

They are also the same problems regulators around the world have been moving towards in the last six months. Australia amended its under-16 ban in March to put the algorithm itself in scope. The New Mexico court case currently underway is asking a judge to order Meta to remove infinite scroll and push notifications for children. The European Parliament voted in November 2025 to recommend bans on infinite scroll, autoplay and the commercial exploitation of minors.

The Online Safety Act was drafted before any of that. The next round of regulation needs to target the algorithmic features that keep children watching, and the AI tools now in every teenager’s pocket. That is what the UK government has put on the table.

What this means for you right now

Three things.

First, do not assume age checks are protecting your child today. Check the date of birth on every account your child has. On Instagram: Settings → Account → Personal information → Date of birth. On TikTok: Profile → menu → Settings and privacy → Account → Birthday. If the date is wrong, the teen account protections that should be active are not.

Second, the algorithmic features the next round of regulation is targeting are also features you can switch off at home. Push notifications, Shorts feeds, infinite scroll: most platforms now let parents turn these off on teen accounts. The regulators are targeting the same features. You don’t have to wait for them.

Third, the consultation closes on 26 May. If you have a view on whether the rules should go further, on the algorithm, on AI chatbots, on the digital age of consent, submit it before the deadline. Search “Growing Up in the Online World consultation” to find the response form.

Sources: Internet Matters — The Online Safety Act: Are children safer online?, 1 May 2026 UK Government — Growing Up in the Online World consultation House of Commons Library — Proposals to ban social media for children, May 2026 eSafety Commissioner — Australia’s amended social media rules, March 2026

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