Research
Existing age limits on social media are widely acknowledged as ineffective — COPPA's 13-year threshold was a legal compromise, not a developmental standard, and roughly 40–86% of underage children use platforms anyway, with verification systems routinely bypassed — yet whether this exposure actually causes measurable mental health harm remains genuinely scientifically contested, with causal evidence lagging well behind the "public health crisis" rhetoric driving legislation. The central policy tension is not simply protection versus freedom, but a deeper dispute about *who decides*: Western debates pit state authority against parental rights, while non-Western models (China's tripartite ecosystem, South Korea's adaptive consent, Chile's algorithmic transparency) suggest that framing is itself a cultural artifact, with relational and community-based approaches showing comparable or stronger harm-reduction outcomes than hard age bans. Critically, no outcome data yet exists for the most ambitious laws (Australia's under-16 ban only took effect December 2025), market-oriented and individual-agency critiques are structurally underrepresented in the sourcing, and the briefing largely omits how age restrictions may harm marginalized children who depend on social media for community access — gaps that should weigh heavily before treating any single regulatory model as settled.
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