Challenges of protecting children and teens from social media
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Protecting children and teenagers from social media addiction remains a challenge for authorities and regulators around the world. Last week, YouTube, owned by Google, reached an out-of-court settlement in a lawsuit brought by a 16-year-old in Florida. Earlier this year, another teenager won a landmark case against Meta and YouTube in California. Thousands of lawsuits are now pending in the United States and Europe. Meanwhile, Brazil is implementing a law that requires measures to prevent the compulsive use of technology services by minors.
Technology companies are under increasing scrutiny in the United States over their influence on young people. In the absence of federal legislation, at least 20 states have enacted their own laws amid heated political debate and lobbying by Big Tech companies.
Other countries, by contrast, have already banned social media for children under the age of 15 or 16, including Australia, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. Many governments have adopted partial restrictions, including the European Union. China has implemented some of the strictest time limits for minors under 18—allowing only one hour of online gaming per day and blocking video apps and social media at night.
Against this backdrop, Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat face thousands of lawsuits in the United States accusing them of intentionally designing addictive platforms. The complaints focus on features such as infinite scrolling and autoplay videos, which are designed to keep users engaged. The companies deny the allegations and say they have developed online safety and age-monitoring tools.
Decree 12880, issued in March 2026 to regulate Brazil’s Digital Child and Adolescent Statute (Estatuto Digital da Criança e do Adolescente, or Digital ECA), was published just days before a California jury found that Meta’s Instagram and YouTube had been negligent in the design of their platforms and had failed to warn users about the risks associated with their use.
“It is impossible to separate these lawsuits in the United States from the broader context that led to the approval of the Digital ECA and society’s growing concern about the effects of excessive social media use on children and adolescents,” said Lorena Giuberti Coutinho, a director at Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD).
The Digital ECA, signed into law in March, requires providers of information technology products aimed at children and adolescents—or likely to be accessed by them—to “adopt default settings that prevent compulsive use” by minors.
Decree 12880, in turn, assigned the ANPD responsibility for establishing minimum safety requirements and acting to curb manipulative, deceptive, or coercive practices. It also defines mechanisms that encourage compulsive use, including the removal of natural stopping points—a category that may include infinite scrolling in some apps—the automatic loading of new content without user request, rewards based on time spent using a service and excessive notifications.
Coutinho said the ANPD has been working with regulators in other countries to advance several issues, including the prevention of compulsive use.
In November last year, Instituto Alana, a nonprofit organization focused on children’s and adolescents’ rights, filed a complaint with the Federal Prosecutor’s Office for Citizens’ Rights in São Paulo, requesting an investigation into allegedly abusive practices by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, that could encourage addiction to the platform.
In addition to the app’s infinite scrolling interface, the organization argues that TikTok’s short-video format “is particularly effective at capturing users’ attention and ensuring their continued engagement.” It also alleges that the platform rewards users for engagement. One example is the so-called “little flame,” a virtual mascot that appears in conversations between users over the age of 16 after several consecutive days of messaging. The app encourages users to keep interacting to keep the character “alive.”
“It is an engagement-retention feature that can clearly have negative consequences for the development of children and adolescents,” said Maria Mello, Alana’s programs coordinator. She believes the courts have been paying increasing attention to issues involving social media regulation. “I believe the decisions in the United States are very inspiring in that regard.”
Asked by Valor for comment, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office for Citizens’ Rights in São Paulo said prosecutor Yuri Luz is preparing an opinion on the complaint.
The decree did not establish a specific deadline for issuing the minimum safety requirements related to preventing compulsive use. “At this moment, the ANPD’s priorities under the Digital ECA are focused on regulating the law’s core concepts, age verification mechanisms, and updating enforcement and penalty regulations,” the regulator said.
Age verification mechanisms are the tools platforms use to determine a user’s actual age. Under the decree, age verification is to begin with app stores such as Google Play and the Apple App Store, as well as operating systems, which must provide information free of charge confirming a user’s age or age group.
The ANPD said it began monitoring in June how app stores and operating systems are adapting to the new guidelines, including implementation of the age signal. The initial review focuses on Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Asked by Valor about Instituto Alana’s complaint, TikTok declined to comment but said it is committed to keeping children under 13 off the platform “while the industry seeks a global consensus on the challenge of age verification.” According to the company, everyone who signs up for the platform must go through a multilayered age verification process. “This includes self-declaration, age estimation models, human moderation and reporting mechanisms.”
TikTok also said it has introduced a number of features specifically for children and teenagers, including Family Pairing, which allows parents and guardians to manage young users’ activity, such as limiting the time they spend on the platform and the content they can access.
Meta told Valor that it has offered “age-appropriate experiences for teenagers on Instagram and Facebook for years” and that in 2024 it launched Teen Accounts, which are automatically enabled for users between the ages of 13 and 17 and come with default protections that limit the content they can view. Among the measures it uses to verify users’ ages are requiring a date of birth during registration and using artificial intelligence to identify accounts that may belong to teenagers. In cases of suspected false information, users may be asked to provide identification or record a video selfie.
Google also said it is implementing an age-estimation model in Brazil that uses machine learning to interpret a variety of signals associated with a user’s account, such as search activity and the categories of videos watched on YouTube. “These signals help us determine whether a person is likely over or under the age of 18 and enable us to apply automatic protections across our products, including blocking 18+ content on YouTube and Google Play, as well as enabling SafeSearch and filtering inappropriate search results,” the company said.
Translation: Melissa Harkin, CT
