Children’s Rights and the Child-Proofed Internet
Historically, new technologies are made available to children as soon as they are developed, and attempts at regulation follow years, even generations, later. Facebook was launched to the public in 2006, Pornhub in 2007 and Instagram in 2010. Roughly twenty years later, age-gating legislation, policies that require users to verify their age, through uploading identification documents or submitting to face scanning software, in order to access certain information or areas of the internet, is being implemented worldwide. The UK, France and Italy have all passed measures requiring websites hosting sexually explicit content to verify that users are eighteen or over before entering the site. Australia is currently working with Google and Microsoft to design age-gating measures to stop children from encountering “pornography, high-impact violence, self-harm harm and suicidal content” while using their search engines. Australia has also passed legislation restricting children under sixteen from using social media sites. In the United States, twenty-five states have passed age-gating legislation, and Congress is currently considering nineteen online safety bills, including the controversial Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), and the Reducing Exploitative Social Media Exposure Act, which would ban children under sixteen from using social media sites. Critics of age-gating policies argue that they pose a data privacy risk (making personal documents managed by third-party services vulnerable to hacking and breaches), as well as a surveillance risk (further deanonymizing internet use), an information equity-risk (restricting internet use for people who don’t have access to the required documents) and a censorship risk. In the United States in particular, critics of KOSA argue that it is using bipartisan anxieties about technology’s negative impacts on children to advance a censorious conservative agenda. Building off this critique, I argue that age-gating measures present a potential harm to children’s rights to information and free expression, while neglecting to mitigate other harms that digital media perpetuates against children, such as their right to rest, leisure and play. I argue that making the internet safer for children shouldn’t mean restricting their access to it, but instead making design choices with children’s developmental needs in mind, as well as building offline structures of support to help children navigate the internet and counter the processes of atomization and alienation.
Anxiety around children’s use of social media has been brewing for years. In 2023, acting Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on social media and youth mental health, and followed up with a New Times op-ed calling for a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, “to remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe”. In the opening to his essay, Murthy declares the soaring rates of depression and anxiety in youth to be a state of emergency, one that necessitates action in the absence of a conclusive understanding of the relationship between social media use and youth mental health. Murthy takes care to express that social media use is “associated with significant harms” to youth mental health, establishing a relationship of correlation rather than a direct causation, and describing social media as “an important contributor” to the youth mental health crisis, rather than its sole originator. In his advisory report he makes clear that the effects of social media on kids are mixed, due to kids not being a monolithic group, specifying that social media “can provide benefits for some children, including by serving as a source of connection for youth who are often marginalized, such as the LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities”. Murthy’s report outlines the key risks of youth social media use to be: exposure to content that promotes hate, self-harm or body-dysmorphia and addictive design features that are impacting children’s sleeping habits (important to brain development and emotional regulation). Murthy calls for measures to “shield young people” from online harassment and abuse, as well as from “exposure to extreme violence and sexual content”. He also calls for measures to prevent platforms from collecting children’s data, and from using addictive design features such as “push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains”.
Another key player in the conversation around technology’s effect on children’s mental health is the social scientist Jonathan Haidt. His bestselling 2024 book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness argues that a shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood is solely responsible for the youth mental health crisis, and calls for measures such as banning phones in schools and keeping adolescents off social media. Critics point out that this diagnosis ignores other societal factors such as growing economic precarity and climate crisis, and question what we might be missing if we focus so narrowly on technology. Rather than restricting children’s media access, other scholars take a harm reduction approach. In a New York Times article discussing the importance of the queer kids coda in Murthy’s surgeon general warning on social media, public health researcher Jessica Fish makes an analogy likening social media to gay bars– both represent necessary spaces for queer people to find safety, acceptance and community. And just as consuming alcohol comes with inherent risks, so does navigating the internet. According to Fish, “the challenge is to mitigate the harms, while enabling young people to experience the benefits. To mitigate these harms, Fish suggests “making sites safer for young people” and “teaching digital literacy”, strategies that take a harm reduction approach by focusing on platform design and ways to support children as they navigate online spaces.
Activists have been sounding the alarm since KOSA was first introduced that it’s a “censorship bill in disguise”. In 2023, Teen Vogue published an op-ed explaining that the bill “authorizes state attorneys general to be the ultimate arbiters of what is good or bad for kids”, meaning that if “a state attorney general asserts that information about gender-affirming care or abortion care could cause a child depression or anxiety, they could sue an app or website for not removing that content” and to prevent liability, platforms might engage in self censorship. The Heritage Foundation was already advocating for KOSA in 2022, specifically to censor youth speaking online about queer and trans identity. In a clumsy report conflating social media use, “woke design” of platforms, and youth identifying as trans and suffering from depression, “How Big Tech Turns Kids Trans” calls youth media-made such as queer fan fiction on Wattpad and informative videos about top surgery on Tiktok harmful content. The writers recommend “raising the minimum age for internet use” and passing KOSA, to “prohibit the sexual exploitation of minors and the promotion of content that poses risks to minors’ physical and mental health” and “guard against the harms of sexual and transgender content”. The bill’s cosponsor, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, publicly stated in 2023 that the top priority for conservatives should be “protecting minor children from the trans gender in this culture and that influence”, claiming that children are being indoctrinated on social media, and pitches KOSA as a way to prevent that.
KOSA was recently rewritten to attempt to address the free speech concerns expressed by Fight for the Future and others, and the public is split on whether the updated bill has the power to hold tech companies accountable for harms to their underage users. Whether it will pass remains to be seen, but the embrace of the bill by transphobic conservative lawmakers illustrates the risk involved in giving the state the power to decide what is and isn’t appropriate for children. In “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival”, Dean Spade warns that relying on legalized avenues of change can be counterproductive, as those avenues are often the “least disruptive and the most beneficial to existing conditions”. “Spade writes: “Resistant intellectual traditions have consistently raised the concern that reforms emerge in the face of disruptive movements demanding justice but for the most part are designed to demobilize by asserting that the problem has been taken care of, meanwhile making as little material change as possible.” Instead, Spade advocates for “three kinds of work that change material conditions rather than just winning empty declarations of equality: (a) work to dismantle existing harmful systems and/or beat back their expansion, (b) work to directly provide for people targeted by such systems and institutions, and (c) work to build an alternative infrastructure through which people can get their needs met.” Inspired by these principles, I imagine three alternate strategies for protecting children online, working from a children’s rights framework.
In 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child declared children to be citizens of the world, in possession of a unique set of rights. While the United States neglected to ratify the document, 192 other countries did, pledging to protect children’s rights through their laws and policies. While the Convention on the Rights of the Child functions more as an aspirational standard than as law governments must adhere to, it provides a framework to think about children as rights holders, and as complete beings, rather than just adults to be. It helps us think about children’s capacity, and what they need to flourish. The Convention on the Rights of the Child divides children’s rights into three categories: provisions rights, protection rights and participation rights. Provisions rights include the right to education, rest and leisure. Protection rights include protection from physical and mental violence and economic exploitation. Participation rights include freedom of expression, freedom of information and the ability to participate freely in cultural life and the arts. The current state of social media and the internet at large infringes on some of these rights– such as rest, leisure and freedom from mental violence, while enabling others– such as freedom of expression, access to information and participation in cultural life. Additionally, a children’s rights framework must account for the rights of all children, i.e., not just children privileged enough to be regular users of the internet, but also children who don’t have internet access, and children whose access to water is being disrupted by data centers being built in their communities. Finally, a children’s rights framework interrupts fixed ideas about children’s capacity, looking at childhood through history and across the world to compare different expectations about what children can and should do and experience.
How can we advocate for children’s rights in the internet age through other means beyond legislation? Three strategies are fighting censorship and surveillance through obfuscation, building alternatives using Design for Children’s Rights Principles, and critical digital literacy. Since age-gating laws have taken off across the United States, studies have found them ineffective at achieving their stated goal of keeping minors off of restricted sites. Researchers found an increase in searches for VPNs, ostensibly being used by minors to bypass the restrictions by obscuring their location, as well as an increase in searches for porn sites, suggesting that minors are searching for sites dodging the age-gating restrictions. While ensuring minors have access to unlimited online pornography shouldn’t be any adult’s priority, digital obfuscation strategies like VPNs and practices of information-seeking to circumvent content bans represent paths forward should age-gating policies be extended beyond porn sites, as Fight for the Future predicts they could be:
“With gender-affirming healthcare and abortion access under threat, and young people increasingly electrified around political action, ID check laws threaten young and marginalized people who would be cut off from access to lifesaving information and vital advocacy. After all, who’s to say that learning about the climate crisis or gun violence isn’t ‘harmful to minors?’ As with everything from sex education to harm reduction, young people, especially marginalized youth, are better equipped, live longer, and do better when they have access to information and resources.”
As the political landscape becomes increasingly repressive, it may become increasingly critical to use digital obfuscation strategies to ensure youth have access to the information they need.
While the major social media platforms struggle to incorporate safeguards into their products to protect child users, and consistently fail to prioritize the wellbeing of child users over their bottomlines, Designing for Children’s Rights is a nonprofit organization dedicated to conceptualizing how digital tools can be designed with the needs and rights of children in mind. In the Designing for Children’s Rights Guide, they list ten design principles that create a positive digital experience for children, grouped under three themes: inclusion, play and learning, and safety and sustainability, which considers both the physical and mental safety of child users and the necessity of sustainable design to protecting children’s right to a safe environment. Rather than attempting to reform the existing system, the Designing for Children’s Rights Guide encourages designers to imagine digital experiences that center children’s wellbeing from the start, platforms that would prioritize privacy and safety by design, and could be the start of an alternative network of truly child-centered online spaces.
In “Solidarity Not Charity”, Spade discusses a line of questioning used by prison abolitionists to assess whether proposed prison reforms serve to strengthen or to reduce the power of the prison industrial complex. I propose that internet reform measures can be judged by whether they strengthen or reduce the power of surveillance capitalism. Attempting to protect children on the internet by building safer online spaces that don’t run on datamining could chip away at the reach of surveillance capitalism by drawing users from mainstream to alternative platforms. Attempting to protect children on the internet by cordoning off certain areas through digital ID checks strengthens surveillance capitalism infrastructure by further deanonymising internet use. Could another approach to the issue of children encountering porn on the internet be better sex education? One that provides developmentally appropriate information about sex and sexuality, directs children to vetted resources to answer their questions, emphasizes the message that pornography is a performance, not a guide to how to have sex, and even cautions against the harms of porn addiction? Obviously this would be a very unpopular idea within the conservative communities leading the anti-porn age-gating charge (or would run the risk of being co-opted by a Christian abstinence agenda), but maybe there is a digital-age sex education gap that needs to be filled, either by radical community groups or online materials. Digital literacy typically consists of privacy protection and information literacy curricula, but programming that gives children resources and space to process exposure to content that promotes disordered eating or hate speech can and should fall under this umbrella as well. Digital youth support groups could function as a form of consciousness-raising, empowering children to work towards healthy relationships with internet-use, while teaching social emotional learning skills and building the kinds of strong in-person bonds that the digital-age has long been fraying.
bell hook’s theory of engaged pedagogy argues that education can be a “practice of freedom” when teachers teach “in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of [their] students” and when both teachers and students are “interested in co-creation and spiritual growth”. Could engaged pedagogy be an approach to the youth mental health crisis? In her pursuit of spiritual wellbeing for herself and her students, bell hooks turns to the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, which emphasizes the “union of mind, body and spirit”. In her writing exploring the attention economy, what she calls “a battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency” resulting in an experience of information overwhelm, and symptoms of burnout, depression and anxiety, Jenny Odell also recommends a reemphasizing of body-mind connection, and finds that moments of spirituality and increased overall wellbeing can be found through engaging with the natural world. Children and adults are both struggling with the demands of the attention economy, and struggling to navigate the reach of the internet in our lives– developing an engaged pedagogy approach to digital literacy could enable children and adults to study the attention economy and develop resistance practices together.
As Congress considers age-gating legislation decades after the dawn of the social internet, there is another new, society-reshaping technology being explored by children. AI is being marketed to children in the form of toys, educational tools, and a way to pass time. It presents huge risks to youth mental health, as well as to education. When we discuss how to regulate children’s access to AI, let’s make sure that all children are considered in the conversation, and not used as pawns to advocate for an agenda that violates their rights. As AI disrupts the social fabric, let’s focus on how to meet children’s needs while building alternative systems of support.