Meta argues against social media bans without workable, privacy-preserving age checks

Governments are moving quickly to protect children online, but Meta says the policy debate is missing a hard technical and logistical question: how platforms can verify a teen’s age safely and accurately. In a new post, the company argues that social media bans or other broad restrictions are unlikely to work if age verification is not solved with a credible, privacy-preserving mechanism, warning that enforcement gaps can send teens to other unmonitored services.

Meta’s argument centers on what it calls the difficulty of proving age on the internet. The company says many teens do not have traditional government identification, and it argues that requiring users to upload sensitive documents to each app they download would create significant privacy and security risks. It also notes that smaller or newer platforms may not have the security infrastructure needed to protect such data at scale, increasing the likelihood of breaches affecting large numbers of people.

Rather than treating verification as an optional add-on, Meta says there is a simpler approach that can be applied consistently across apps: centralizing age verification and parental consent through the app store. Under the proposal, the phone would act as a single checkpoint by verifying a person’s age once at the device level, allowing parents to approve or deny app downloads across multiple apps without sending sensitive documents to each individual platform.

Meta points to existing systems as proof of feasibility. The company says Apple and Google already collect age information when a parent sets up a teen’s phone and already have mechanisms to obtain parental approval before teens can make purchases. It is asking that similar mechanisms be extended to app downloads so that age verification can be handled once, rather than repeatedly across dozens of apps.

The company uses Australia as an example of what it considers an incomplete policy design. Meta says Australia’s under-16 social media ban was introduced without an established, privacy-preserving age verification method, leading to reported workarounds. It says teens have bypassed inconsistent checks and moved to unmonitored apps and gaming sites outside the scope of the restrictions.

Meta argues that these shifts can reduce safety rather than improve it. It says when teens migrate through workarounds, they can lose protections built into mainstream platforms, including “Teen Accounts” on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger that are designed to keep younger users safer. The company also cites a wider warning from the research community, saying a joint statement from more than 370 international academics and privacy experts warned that broad bans can carry massive risks to privacy and autonomy if age verification is not handled within a coherent, secure framework.

In the same post, Meta says the company will comply with local laws as they evolve, but argues that current legislative proposals do not address the underlying age-verification challenge. It also urges lawmakers to revisit the central question of how societies can reliably verify age online, suggesting that without an answer, other measures become “workarounds” that may shift risk rather than eliminate it.

Meta ties its proposal to legislative momentum in the United States. It says more than half of U.S. states have introduced app-store age legislation of the kind it supports, and it lists states including Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, and California as already having enacted versions. It also points to federal movement, describing the App Store Accountability Act as advancing through Congress.

The company emphasizes broad public backing for the app-store model. Meta says polls show 85% of American parents support requiring app stores to verify age and get parental approval before teens download apps. It also claims 82% of Australian parents and nearly 75% of parents across eight European countries support parental approval, and it says multiple companies have endorsed the approach, including Match Group, X, Snap, and Pinterest.

Still, Meta’s post does not provide a detailed blueprint for how app-store verification would work across every type of device, jurisdiction, and edge case. It also does not spell out which specific privacy-preserving technical designs would be mandated, beyond the idea of handling checks at the device level through mechanisms already used by Apple and Google. As lawmakers weigh proposals, the critical questions likely include what data, if any, is shared, how accuracy is measured, and how parental consent is updated over time when children’s circumstances change.