The global push to regulate children’s social media use is shifting responsibility away from parental control and towards platforms engineered to profit from children’s attention.

Across the world, as governments take steps to regulate children’s social media use, the debate around digital harm is undergoing a fundamental transformation. 

From Australia to the United Kingdom and from Norway to Türkiye, regulations being developed in many countries converge on a common point: the harms caused by children’s social media use cannot be prevented solely by parental supervision. 

Responsibility must be shared with the digital platforms that design, manage, and profit from online environments.

This shift does not absolve parents or public authorities of responsibility. Families and states remain central actors in child protection. 

However, governments are now adopting a clearer and more insistent stance that responsibility should be extended to the platforms that design, optimise, and commercialise digital environments.

Like other users, children do not simply “use” social media; they are continuously steered, incentivised, and kept on platforms by infrastructures optimised for profit maximisation. 

Infinite scrolling mechanisms, algorithmic recommendation systems, and reward loops are deliberately designed to sustain the attention economy.

Under these circumstances, expecting parents to be the only counterforce and to deal with trillion-dollar attention economy machines is neither realistic nor fair.

A substantial body of multidisciplinary academic research on children and adolescents shows that excessive social media use is strongly linked to anxiety disorders, depression, sleep problems, attention deficits, body dysmorphia related to filtered visual content, and eating disorders.

Surveillance capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of “surveillance capitalism” provides a powerful framework for understanding why responsibility is shifting upward. 

Social media platforms systematically gather and analyse user behaviour, forecast future actions, and monetise these insights through targeted advertising and behavioural guidance.

Within this system, children are not just vulnerable users but also valuable data subjects. 

Every swipe, pause, like, and emotional reaction produces behavioural surplus.

For children whose cognitive and emotional development is still growing, this data extraction generates far deeper and longer-term consequences.

Algorithms do........

© TRT World