Save the Children Policy Statement on Social Media Bans (2025)

In response to rising concerns about children’s rights, safety, wellbeing and mental health in digital environments, governments around the world are increasingly considering or adopting new legislation that sets national minimum age standards for using specific online platforms such as social media. This has sparked a wider global debate on how best to protect children online. Considering the challenges to children’s safety and wellbeing that exist online, including in many of today’s social media platforms, Save the Children welcomes this important debate on how to best adapt and implement much needed regulation and wider practice to protect children’s rights and keep them safe in this rapidly changing environment.

While Save the Children welcomes the strong political intent to keep children safe online, we are concerned that laws relying solely on age-based restrictions risk creating unintended harms, a false sense of safety, and may curtail children’s rights and opportunities. The main goal for lawmakers should be to make online spaces safe, age appropriate and enriching for children, and responsive to their rights and participation, as opposed to off limits. This means not only protecting children from harm, but ensuring that digital environments are designed with, by and for children, and support their expression, connection and participation.

Save the Children calls on policymakers at regional, national and global levels to adopt an inclusive, gender-transformative rights-based approach to child online safety by making digital products and services safe by design, ensuring robust regulation and enforcement, building children’s and caregivers’ capacities and embedding meaningful child participation and empowerment measures that uphold children’s rights.