Governments worldwide are moving to limit children’s access to social media as lawmakers question whether platforms are capable of enforcing their own minimum age requirements. TikTok recently became the latest tech giant to give in to regulatory pressure when it announced that it would implement a new age-detection system across Europe to keep kids under the age of 13 off the platform.
The system, which follows a yearlong pilot in the UK meant to proactively identify and remove underage users, relies on a combination of profile data, content analysis, and behavioral signals to evaluate whether an account possibly belongs to a minor. (TikTok requires users to be at least 13 to sign up). According to a statement from the company, its age-detection system does not automatically ban users. The system flags accounts it suspects are run by users under 13 and forwards those accounts to human moderators for review. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
The European rollout comes amid global conversation around the negative effects of social media on children, and as governments debate stricter age-based regulatory approaches. Australia last year became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, including the use of Instagram, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok. The European Parliament is also advocating for mandatory age limits, while Denmark and Malaysia are considering a ban for children under 16.
“We are in the middle of an experiment where American and Chinese tech giants have unlimited access to the attention of our children and young people for hours every single day almost entirely without oversight,” Christel Schaldemose, a Danish lawmaker and vice president of the European Parliament, said in November during parliamentary session that, according to Reuters, “called for an EU-wide ban on access for children under 16 to online platforms, video-sharing sites, and AI companions without parental consent and an outright ban for those younger than 13.”
Advocacy groups in Canada are similarly calling for the creation of a dedicated regulatory body to address online harms affecting young people following the flood of sexualized deepfakes on X by its AI chatbot Grok. ChatGPT recently announced that it was rolling out age prediction software to determine whether an account likely belongs to someone under 18 so the correct safeguards can be applied. In the US, 25 states have enacted some form of age-verification legislation.
“Legislatures in the US, just in the calendar year 2026, are likely to pass dozens or possibly hundreds of new laws requiring online age authentication,” says Eric Goldman, a law professor and associate dean at Santa Clara University who has argued that any “government-compelled censorship” should automatically be looked at as “constitutionally suspect.”
“Unless something dramatically changes,” Goldman says, “regulators around the globe are building a legal infrastructure that will require most websites and apps to be age-authenticated.”
As platforms act to properly address age verification, does TikTok’s strategy of monitoring users instead of banning kids outright seem like a good compromise? That depends on how you feel about digital surveillance.
“This is a fancy way of saying that TikTok will be surveilling its users’ activities and making inferences about them,” says Goldman. Because platform governance is often tied to political motives, and policy solutions sometimes expose children to more harm than help, Goldman refers to age verification mandates as “segregate-and-suppress laws.”
“Users probably aren’t thrilled about this extra surveillance, and any false positives—like incorrectly identifying an adult as a child—will have potentially major consequences for the wrongly identified user.” Goldman adds that even if this is the right approach for TikTok, most services don’t have enough data about their users to reliably guess peoples’ ages, so the approach is not really scalable across other platforms.
