Youth Safety Laws Are Limiting Youth Rights

Key Takeaways

• Young people are rights-holders under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, including the right to privacy, free expression, and access to information — rights that current safety laws frequently curtail without acknowledgment.
• Age verification systems designed to protect young people collect their biometric data and link their offline identity to their online behavior, applying a significant privacy harm to the group being nominally protected.
• Blanket content restrictions and social media bans block access to LGBTQ+ communities, mental health resources, and reproductive health information that many young people depend on for safety.
• Even the European Data Protection Board has formally flagged the privacy implications of age assurance methods — recognizing the tradeoffs that child safety legislation tends to ignore.

Today is International Youth Day, observed every August 12th by the United Nations to recognize young people's contributions and the challenges they face. This year's observance sits inside a specific contradiction: governments around the world are passing laws to protect young people online, and those same laws are cutting into young people's own rights. 

That's not a fringe critique. It's a structural problem with how online safety legislation has been designed — and International Youth Day is a reasonable occasion to say so clearly.

Youth Have Rights Online, Not Just Online Safety

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), adopted in 1989 and ratified by virtually every country on Earth, gives children specific named rights in the areas of information and expression. They have rights to the freedom of expression, including the right to seek and receive information. And the right to privacy. 

This requires governments to ensure children have access to information and ideas from a diversity of sources. These rights don't disappear at seventeen and materialize at eighteen. They apply to young people, and they apply online.

UNESCO's framework for children's online rights and digital safety frames children explicitly as rights-holders, not just objects of protection. That distinction matters. An object of protection is acted upon by legislation. A rights-holder has a claim that legislators are obliged to weigh seriously when designing laws that affect them. 

Most online safety legislation, as currently written, doesn't make that distinction. It's designed around what adults want to keep children away from — without substantive consideration of what young people need access to, or what data these systems collect about them in the process of "protecting" them.

What Gets Blocked Along With the "Harmful" Content

Australia banned children under 16 from social media platforms in December 2025, the most sweeping restriction of its kind anywhere. The stated goal was protecting children from harmful content and predatory contact. The collateral effect included cutting off access to LGBTQ+ youth communities, mental health peer support groups, political organizing spaces used by young activists, and the online relationships that represent the primary social connections for many isolated teenagers.

The UK's Online Safety Act, now enforced by Ofcom, requires platforms to verify user ages before granting access to broadly defined "harmful content." In practice, platforms have applied those requirements to forums covering LGBT+ issues, journalism, and public health — because the definition is broad enough to reach them, and over-applying the check is the safest legal strategy for platforms facing liability. 

Young people trying to find support for questions about their identity, mental health, or reproductive health encounter the same verification wall as someone trying to access explicit pornography. This isn't incidental. It's the predictable outcome of delegating the definition of harmful content to platforms with strong legal incentives to err wide. Young people carry the cost of that overreach.

The Specific Irony of Age Verification

The European Data Protection Board raised formal concerns about the privacy implications of age verification methods — including their application to the young people these systems claim to protect. 

The EDPB's concern identifies the central irony: systems designed to protect children's safety online collect children's biometric data, link their offline identities to their online behavior, and create centralized records that can be breached, subpoenaed, or misused.

Every age check is a data collection event. A platform applying facial age estimation to comply with a child safety law is scanning a teenager's face to protect them. That biometric data sits with a third-party verification provider whose security practices the teenager has no ability to audit or control. 

How age verification infrastructure expands from one platform category to the next follows the same dynamic: the systems built in the name of protection accumulate data about the protected group and create infrastructure that outlasts the original purpose.

Protection and Rights Are Not Opposites

I think the political difficulty here’s real. No legislator wants to be described as opposing child safety. But recognizing that young people have rights is not the same as opposing their protection — it's the minimum standard for legislation that claims to serve them rather than simply manage their behavior.

The UNCRC framework and UNESCO's work on children's digital rights both offer a route through the false binary. Protection and rights are compatible when the protection is proportionate, when privacy-preserving alternatives are tried before surveillance infrastructure, and when young people are treated as stakeholders in decisions about their digital lives rather than passive beneficiaries of adult choices.

International Youth Day exists to center young people's perspectives. The demand that safety legislation be designed to protect their rights — not just restrict their access — belongs in that conversation. 

A law that blocks a teenager from a mental health community while collecting their facial geometry to do it hasn't protected them. It's found a new way to surveil them.