Children’s Digital Rights Need More Than a False Promise of Safety

Lisa Dittmer is Amnesty International’s Children’s Digital Rights Researcher, and Paloma Candia and Ahmed Dhman are two of Amnesty International’s Digital Rights Champions, a global network of child and youth human rights defenders.

Children’s online safety has become a leading political issue as concerns about Big Tech harms have moved from academic debates to bestseller lists and mainstream news. French President Emmanuel Macron hailed France’s teen social media ban as “leading the way in Europe in protecting our children and our teenagers.” France’s top court later blocked the law, citing privacy and freedom of expression concerns. United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Guterres has called for an artificial intelligence (AI) Child Safety Pledge. Yet amid the flurry of high-level pledges and the rush to protect “our children,” the voices of one demographic are noticeably absent: children themselves.

A brief prerecorded video aside, not a single child got to speak when a new state coalition for the protection of children launched its work at the UN AI Dialogue in July. Kenya, one of the state parties to the coalition, is currently debating a new AI bill that lacks any child-specific protections or consultation mechanism. The absence of children and young people in policymaking spaces and the failure to recognize their demands and needs are clearly linked.

Globally, a mixture of Big Tech state capture, political shortsightedness and a rise in digital authoritarian practices is hollowing out children’s rights just as the world proclaims to finally making children safe online.

Mitigating harm rather than fulfilling rights

Children and young people are frequently treated as passive subjects who need to be saved through regulation rather than as participants in shaping the rules that affect them. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes children’s right to be heard, but their participation all too often remains tokenistic at best. Inviting comments from a select number of children within predefined confines and without means to materially shape processes and outcomes isn’t meaningful participation.

It is this paternalistic attitude that increasingly reduces children’s digital rights issues to a question of mitigating harm, rather than the fulfillment of their rights and the creation of a positive digital future. While social media harms need urgent addressing, teen social media bans exemplify the resulting performative politics, which seek to appease an adult voter base rather than address the root causes of tech harms.

Child and youth campaigners have long called for solutions that address the manipulative design choices and the privacy violations common to children’s experiences across social media, games and AI chatbots. Youth-led organizations such as ctrl+alt+reclaim, Design it for Us and Flippgen have been vocal advocates for more nuanced solutions that reflect children’s and young people’s lived experiences.

And still, these calls for systemic change all too often go unheard as political leaders embrace supposed quick wins for “our protection.” Risks such as cyberbullying, grooming, online violence, and problematic social media use need to be tackled, but attempting to lock children out who also rely on these platforms for community, information and activism dismisses a whole set of rights for a false promise of safety. Evidence from Australia shows clear flaws in this thinking: children continue to access the harmful platforms they were meant to be locked out of while those who evade the ban or are never excluded remain exposed to the very harms the policy seeks to tackle.

Meanwhile, core challenges to children and young people’s digital rights remain unaddressed.

The normalization of online surveillance in children’s lives

Children and young people are growing up in a world where their personal data is constantly collected, tracked and shared, from the moment online platforms and advertisers pick up on a pregnancy to their first exploration of the digital world through videos and games, and on to schools and universities, which increasingly monitor learners through safeguarding tools, biometric attendance registration and AI-enabled performance analysis and behavior management. In this way, children are trained to grow accustomed to surveillance by a largely invisible network of government and private actors, in most cases without free and informed consent.

Many of the same governments currently debating teenage restrictions on social media enthusiastically embrace the AI hype in education, inviting collaborations with major AI firms to bring chatbots into schools despite serious concerns about the lack of child rights safeguards related to online privacy, manipulative design, discriminatory and otherwise harmful outputs, as well as a lack of research evidence of educational benefits and risks.

Children’s data remains poorly protected and is now at risk of being eroded further by the age assurance tools necessary to enforce teen bans. The global drive is one towards stricter age checks, presenting new risks of additional data trails, cybersecurity incidents and online surveillance by both corporate and state actors. France just sidestepped the question of enforcement of its new teen ban law to avoid a clash with European regulation, but so-called Digital Identity Wallets will soon pervade online experiences across the EU, despite concerns from privacy experts.

Governments including Turkey, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates are seizing the child online safety moment to propose measures that will further add to existing privacy and free expression concerns affecting child and adult internet users alike.

Casting governments as a force for good amidst increasing digital repression

The current debate also ignores the many ways in which governments actively abuse technology to monitor and silence children and young people. The recent wave of influential Gen Z protests across diverse contexts, including, among others, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Kenya, Madagascar and Peru, has highlighted the power of digitally connected and social media-savvy youths.

On the flip side, governments are increasingly turning young activists’ social media footprints and data trails into tools of censorship and repression. When students took to the streets of Delhi to demand the resignation of the education minister, the Indian government responded by first shutting down mobile data service in central parts of the city, then came for the Bluetooth-based app that young people had turned to amidst the shutdown. In Kenya, Amnesty International documented how authorities weaponized online harassment and surveillance to quell nationwide youth-led protests in 2024 and 2025. Big data analysis tools are already taking state surveillance capacities to new levels, facilitating crackdowns on migrants and protesters alike.

All of these are critical challenges to the digital rights of children and young people, which the current narrow fixation on social media bans overlooks. Politics that attempt to shut out the youth instead of working with them will fail, as Australian teens and Indian students are powerfully proving.

Nothing about us without us

Children and young people finally need to be meaningfully included in all their diversity as critical experts of their own experiences if their rights and safety are to be more than a step toward increased internet control and willful disenfranchisement.

Instead of tokenistic one-off engagements, governments need to create opportunities for children to feed into digital policy processes in safe and meaningful ways, showing accountability for how their input is reflected in policy, just as tech companies need to co-design products with children if they are to be used by children.

Regulators should look to build towards a positive digital future, investing in digital literacy and creating policies that preserve and reward the benefits of the digital world, rather than simply mitigating harms. That means effectively safeguarding children’s and adults’ privacy, regulating online services by mandating meaningful user choice and agency and banning manipulative design, reigning in Big Tech power and setting effective limits on state surveillance powers.

“Nobody should have to choose between their safety and their voice,” Kenyan high school student Mark Igathe recently wrote in his winning entry to Amnesty Kenya’s annual digital rights essay competition. Policymakers would do well to make more space for those voices and to listen.