In the digital age, minors, as a native online group, rely heavily on internet platforms for their daily learning, social interaction, and entertainment. Short videos, social media, online games, and live streaming have become important parts of their lives. However, with the rapid expansion of the digital industry, risks such as internet addiction, cyberbullying, harmful information erosion, privacy breaches, misleading consumption, and online fraud continue to spread, posing a comprehensive threat to the mental health, value formation, and personal safety of minors, becoming a common social governance challenge faced by countries worldwide. To systematically address the hidden dangers of digital growth from a legal perspective, from 2024 to 2026, developed and developing countries across all continents revised and implemented new laws specifically for the protection of minors online, constructing a comprehensive regulatory system covering platform access, content control, algorithm standards, privacy protection, and disciplinary accountability.
Global legislation is being enacted in rapid succession, with countries establishing tiered and rigid protection rules.
New laws protecting minors online, enacted in various countries over the past two years, share common characteristics: broad geographical coverage, comprehensive control dimensions, severe penalties, and detailed technical requirements. While each country has developed differentiated provisions based on local internet usage habits and varying risks to minors online, they all share a unified consensus: the core responsibility for online protection rests with platform companies. This is achieved through mandatory age verification, content rating systems, anti-addiction design, and privacy restrictions, blocking risks to minors at the product design stage. Simultaneously, robust punitive mechanisms, including hefty fines, qualification restrictions, and accountability for senior management, compel platforms to proactively fulfill their protective obligations.
Australia is a global benchmark for managing minors on social networks. In November 2024, the Federal Parliament passed the Cybersecurity (Minimum Age for Social Media) Amendment Act, which came into effect in December 2025, making Australia the first country in the world to legislate a comprehensive ban on minors under the age of 16 registering and holding accounts on mainstream social media platforms. The bill's control list covers all major social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X platform, and Snapchat. It requires these platforms to employ multiple technological means, such as facial recognition, document verification, and behavioral feature identification, to block underage users from registering. Existing accounts belonging to minors must be deleted within a specified period.
The law explicitly states that minors and their guardians will not be punished; all responsibility rests with the operating platforms. Companies failing to implement age-based age blocking measures can face fines of up to AU$50 million, and those with serious offenses will be restricted from operating in the country. The country has also established an independent Office of the Child Safety Commissioner, creating a one-stop complaint handling channel specifically for cases involving online bullying, inappropriate content distribution, and privacy breaches related to minors, forming an integrated governance chain encompassing legislative oversight, technological control, and rights protection services.
The EU, based on the Digital Services Act, has launched supplementary guidelines for the protection of minors, covering all 27 member states and establishing a platform design principle prioritizing children's rights. The new regulations require all major internet platforms to set minors' accounts to the highest privacy level by default, and prohibit the use of algorithms that easily induce addiction, such as infinite scrolling, continuous rewards, automatic push notifications, and winning streak check-ins. They also restrict platforms from pushing commercial advertisements and sensational content to minors through automated decision-making, and prohibit the collection and analysis of minors' behavioral data for targeted marketing. Regarding age verification, the EU rejects the single-user self-declaration model, requiring high-risk social media, live streaming, and gaming platforms to adopt reliable verification methods such as identification documents and biometrics. Large platforms that violate these regulations can face fines of up to 6% of their global annual revenue.
Other European countries have simultaneously introduced stricter local regulations. The UK updated its supplementary rules to the Safe Online Act, setting a 16-year-old age limit for social media use, implementing a 10 PM curfew for online use, and restricting minors' access to live streaming and short video social media sections from evening until the early hours of the next day. Platforms that fail to implement age verification will face fines of up to 10% of their global revenue, and related company executives will be held jointly liable. In early 2026, the French National Assembly passed a bill setting 15 as the minimum age for registering social media accounts. Children under 15 must provide written permission from their guardians to use social media apps. The bill also tightens regulations on mobile phone use in schools, prohibiting students from bringing smartphones during school hours.
Several Asian countries are simultaneously addressing legal shortcomings. South Korea has improved its Basic Law on Social Media, extending and upgrading its earlier "Internet Cinderella Act," prohibiting minors under 16 from accessing online games and social media platforms from midnight to early morning. Malaysia and Indonesia will implement new regulations starting in 2026, prohibiting minors under 16 from independently registering social media accounts, requiring guardians to accompany younger individuals online, and focusing on addressing issues such as online pornography targeting teenagers, cyberbullying in schools, and online game fraud.
The proliferation of chaos in cyberspace poses multiple risks that continue to harm the physical and mental health of minors.
The global surge in new, stringent laws protecting the internet stems from the increasing prevalence and scale of harm targeting minors within the digital ecosystem. Minors, whose minds are not yet fully mature, exhibit significant weaknesses in their ability to distinguish right from wrong, their emotional resilience, and their risk awareness. Coupled with the combined effects of indiscriminate algorithmic content delivery, online anonymity, and commercial traffic-driven approaches, they are highly susceptible to falling into various online traps, suffering irreversible damage across multiple dimensions, including physical health, mental well-being, values, property, and personal safety, leading to a global crisis in youth development.
Internet addiction and algorithmic manipulation primarily and severely harm the physical and mental development of minors. Short video and social media platforms, relying on fragmented, highly stimulating content coupled with continuous push mechanisms, relentlessly capture the attention of teenagers, resulting in widespread behaviors such as excessive video watching, late-night online social interaction, and prolonged online gaming. Data from health surveys of teenagers in multiple countries shows that prolonged excessive internet use directly leads to physiological problems such as vision decline, cervical spine strain, disrupted sleep patterns, and a significant reduction in physical activity. The instant gratification of the virtual world also weakens teenagers' ability to engage in in-depth reading and independent thinking, leading to a continuous decline in classroom concentration and a significant impact on academic performance.
Meanwhile, algorithms designed to maintain user retention, such as continuous rewards, endless scrolling, and pop-up notifications, constantly reinforce psychological dependence among teenagers. Some teenagers experience emotional disturbances like irritability, emptiness, and anger after disconnecting from electronic devices, leading to a continuous decline in their willingness to engage in real-world social interaction and gradually developing withdrawn and socially withdrawn personality traits. A UNICEF study confirms that teenagers who use social media for more than 3 hours daily are more than three times more likely to experience anxiety and depression than mild users.
Various harmful online information continues to distort minors' value perceptions, creating hidden dangers for behavioral deviations. The current online space is filled with content unsuitable for teenagers, such as softcore pornography, violent sensationalism, self-harm imitation, flaunting wealth and materialism, extreme and confrontational rhetoric, and dangerous challenge videos. Algorithms continuously and accurately push similar information to minors based on their browsing history, forming a closed loop of negative information. Minors lack a sound value judgment system; prolonged exposure to violent conflict videos, self-harm jokes, and extravagant comparisons can easily blur the lines between right and wrong, leading to the imitation of dangerous behaviors and fostering hedonistic and extreme individualistic ideologies. Some subcultures use anime, trading cards, and humorous short videos to package negative values, spreading negative ideas such as internet slang, school antagonism, and exclusion of the collective, weakening teenagers' sense of responsibility and ambition. Some short videos deliberately glorify school conflicts and online arguments, misleading teenagers into viewing verbal attacks and malicious mockery as normal social interaction, further exacerbating real-world school conflicts.
Cyberbullying, privacy breaches, and online fraud directly threaten the rights and personal safety of minors. Anonymous private messages, group comments, and short video comment sections on social media platforms have become hotspots for cyberbullying, with malicious insults, defamation, exposure of private photos, isolation, and fabrication of negative rumors rampant. Most minors who suffer cyberbullying are afraid to tell their parents or teachers, bearing the psychological pressure alone for a long time. This can range from mild symptoms like aversion to school and low self-esteem to more serious issues like self-denial, self-harm, and suicide.
Privacy risks are also prominent. Many minors casually post their home addresses, schools, contact information, and private photos online, which are collected and used by criminals, leading to offline harassment, home visits, and other potential threats. Platforms that excessively collect data on teenagers' faces, locations, and browsing history also pose risks of information leakage and illegal resale. Online scams targeting minors are constantly evolving. Scams such as game recharge rebates, celebrity merchandise sales, free course raffles, and impersonating relatives to borrow money precisely target teenagers' consumer psychology. Many minors make large recharges and tip livestreamers without their guardians' permission, causing financial losses to families. Some criminals also use online chat to induce minors to send private images, committing crimes such as remote molestation.
Promote the long-term implementation of online protection for minors
Online harm to minors knows no borders. Algorithm dissemination, online platforms, and transnational cybercrime exhibit strong cross-regional mobility, making it difficult for a single country to completely eliminate the risks through independent control. Currently, countries worldwide are simultaneously establishing a multi-faceted governance system that combines international cooperation, platform autonomy, school-family collaboration, and nationwide digital literacy education, in addition to enacting new specific laws. This system balances legal constraints, technological protection, and ideological guidance, achieving simultaneous progress in short-term risk mitigation and long-term ecosystem cultivation, and promoting the normalization and sustainable development of online protection for minors.
Deepening transnational multilateral cooperation and unifying cross-border online regulatory standards are crucial. Leveraging the EU digital governance framework, the UN child protection cooperation mechanism, and regional internet governance alliances, countries continuously share information on online crimes involving minors, standards for identifying harmful content, and age verification technical specifications, establishing joint channels for handling transnational platforms that violate regulations. For large globally operating platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, regulatory agencies from multiple countries are conducting joint investigations, uniformly verifying the platform's compliance implementation in various countries and regions, and simultaneously issuing rectification requirements to prevent companies from implementing double protection standards in different countries.
Developing countries, with the help of international non-profit organizations and technical assistance from developed countries, are improving their local network monitoring equipment, complaint handling systems, and law enforcement personnel, thus narrowing regional governance gaps. Countries regularly hold legislative exchange seminars to share legal practices related to age control, anti-addiction measures, and combating cyberbullying, learning from each other's mature regulatory systems to gradually form globally applicable online protection technologies and legal benchmarks for minors, curbing transnational dissemination of harmful information and cross-border online fraud.
Platforms are strengthening their full-process self-governance responsibilities, using technological means to implement legal compliance requirements. New laws in various countries are detailing platform compliance into implementable technical standards, forcing companies to upgrade their product protection systems. Platforms are comprehensively improving multi-age verification systems, balancing identity recognition accuracy with user privacy and security, and setting differentiated access permissions for high, medium, and low-risk sections such as general entertainment, live streaming social interaction, and stranger interaction; optimizing algorithm recommendation mechanisms, defaulting to blocking violent, pornographic, self-harming, and competitive content, disabling addictive functions such as autoplay, infinite scrolling, and continuous check-in, and automatically limiting minors' daily and weekly online usage time, with mandatory locking after timeouts.
A dedicated complaint channel for minors has been established, staffed 24/7 to handle reports of cyberbullying, inappropriate content, and privacy breaches. Infringing content is promptly removed, violating accounts are banned, and complete evidence is preserved for transfer to regulatory and judicial authorities. Online spending by minors is strictly controlled; large top-ups and livestream tipping require secondary confirmation from guardians. The refund process for excessive spending by minors has been simplified, lowering the threshold for families to seek redress. Internal compliance checks for minor protection are conducted regularly, and operational reports are proactively submitted to regulatory departments, subjecting the government to routine spot checks.
Conclusion
We must clearly recognize that legal provisions are merely the starting point, not the end, of protecting minors online. The effective implementation of the new law requires comprehensive cooperation from various countries' regulatory authorities to enforce the law strictly, from internet companies to proactively comply with regulations, from schools and families to provide collaborative guardianship, and from improving the digital literacy of young people themselves. Cyberspace knows no borders, and online harm has a strong ability to spread across regions. Only by continuously deepening international multilateral cooperation, unifying regulatory standards, and sharing governance experiences can we completely curb the spread of harmful information across borders and cross-border online fraud. At the same time, governance is not simply about restricting minors' access to the internet, but about eliminating online risks through scientific management, preserving the positive value of the internet in learning, science popularization, and cultural exchange, and guiding young people to use digital tools rationally, healthily, and independently.
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