This February, Spain announced plans for a comprehensive social media ban for children under 16. It was no longer acceptable, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told an audience at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, to leave children unattended in the “digital Wild West,” which he described as rife with “addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation [and] violence.”
Sánchez was clear on another point. The proposed ban, which is still pending parliamentary approval, would require social media platforms to implement “not just check boxes, but real barriers that work” for age verification. The BBC suggested his comment may have been in reference to Australia’s ban, with its laxer checks already proving somewhat susceptible to loopholes.
Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Authologic.
Spain and Australia are not anomalies here. A range of legislation—some passed, some still being debated—in countries like Portugal, France, Denmark, Greece, and Ireland cover everything from raising age limits as high as 16 and tying access to verified parental consent. In the US, the Trump administration is reportedly considering a nationwide social media ban modeled after Australia following the failure of the Kids Off Social Media Act to advance in Congress.
The various proposals and fact-finding committees far outnumber the pieces of actual legislation, but the appetite for action on the issue is undeniable. This is a global movement driven by rightfully concerned parents, educators, and policymakers. The risk of psychological harm through exposure to explicit and hateful content has grown too enormous to ignore.
This risk, however, doesn’t justify policies that would undermine fundamental digital privacy and autonomy rights, and therein lies one of the most pressing (and under-discussed) issues lurking behind these bans.
Privacy trade-offs in the name of safety
Identity verification will be crucial to any properly functioning ban. If you ban people under 16 from social media, you need to give people over 16 a way to legally access the same platforms.
The simplest mechanism to verify someone’s identity is to require a photo of a government ID like a driver’s license or a passport. This method is also completely unacceptable, as it creates a centralized trove of sensitive information that can be compromised by a bad actor. Even when digital wallets or national ID apps are used, the risk remains that platforms, third parties, or governments will gain access to more personal data than necessary.
This isn’t an imagined hypothetical. China’s Internet real-name system requires users to register services with their real identity, making it a target of warranted criticism over privacy breaches and surveillance overreach. The UK’s Online Safety Act has been similarly criticized for its dependence on face and ID scanning as a means of age verification.
The EU has tried to avoid similar issues by insisting that its own systems of age-verification ought to be anonymous and device-based. A number of proposals put forward by EU countries, however, still gravitate toward outdated solutions that collect a surplus of data.
Policymakers tend to default to invasive checks that equate verification with disclosure, and the resulting tension is one digital rights advocates will recognize. What is the price of privacy? And how do we protect kids from harm without compromising everyone’s privacy and autonomy?
Digital identification and age assurance
Rather than keep minors off social media altogether, some policymakers have floated the idea of implementing minor-specific restrictions within the platforms themselves. The European Parliament is currently debating limiting minors from accessing in-platform features like infinite scrolling, auto play, pull-to-refresh, reward loops, and gamification.
Although more nuanced than a straight ban, these proposed restrictions complicate the larger age verification issue by requiring minors to submit age proofs instead of adults. When we wave off these challenges as naturally solved by ‘digital identity,’ we inadvertently frame digital identity as a single, one-size-fits-all tool—which it isn’t.
Some digital identity solutions require users to submit highly sensitive data, such as photos of government-issued IDs and their own face, extending well beyond what’s actually needed to prove legal age. Newer approaches designed to limit how much information is shared allow people to prove specific attributes without exposing their full identity. This is going to be a critical distinction as we edge closer to the burden of proof falling on people under 18.
Policymakers need to prioritize privacy-centric digital ID technologies to protect adults and kids. New technologies are making this possible.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are one of them. ZKPs are cryptographic techniques that allow a user to prove the truth of a claim—“I am at least 16 years old”—to a platform without revealing any specific identifying information, such as their birthdate. This minimal data exchange transmits the truth of the over-16 claim and nothing else. There’s no centralized database that can be hacked, leaked, or misused. This is an essential protection for platforms requiring verification from minors.
A number of digital wallets are already adopting ZKPs for identity assertions, but implementation is far behind the intensifying progress of social media bans. It has to catch up. Eroding the digital privacy of adults was never the solution, and ZKPs reconcile this desire to protect individual freedoms with the goal to safeguard minors online.
Underscoring this debate is the broader principle that safety and liberty shouldn’t be treated as zero-sum, and can be complementary when systems are designed with both in mind. Protecting kids online is long overdue and a noble goal, but it risks funneling everyone toward a model of centralized and privacy-violating digital governance.
This is to be avoided. The next decade of digital regulation will involve a flood of social media bans, but it must be accompanied by better identification mechanisms that protect without exposing. Nothing less than a truly safe and open internet is at stake.
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