Better Internet for Kids

This 2021 5Rights Foundation report examines how age assurance can be used to recognise children online and enable digital services to provide age-appropriate protections and experiences. It explains the different forms of age assurance, including age verification and age estimation, and assesses their risks, benefits and appropriate uses.

This 2023 5Rights report examines how persuasive design features used by digital services can affect children’s behaviour, development and wellbeing. It looks at techniques designed to maximise engagement, such as reward loops, notifications, personalised recommendations and other attention-capturing features, and considers their effects on children’s mental health, relationships, sleep, education and autonomy.

This 2023 5Rights report examines how children’s developmental stages interact with their experiences in the digital environment. It draws on child development research to look at different age groups, their typical digital interactions, and the associated risks, challenges and opportunities. It also considers how developmental milestones can inform digital policy and product design.

This 2026 joint statement, signed by more than 170 organisations and experts, urges the European Commission to prioritise safety-by-design regulation rather than blanket age-based social media bans. It argues that responsibility for children’s online safety should rest primarily with technology providers, which should make services safe and private by design and by default.

This 2024 COFACE policy brief examines how families can be better supported to ensure children have safe and enriching experiences online. It reviews the main EU policy and legislative frameworks affecting children’s rights in the digital environment, including BIK+, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act and initiatives on child sexual abuse, and considers how well they take the family perspective into account.

This 2024 report from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child sets out 17 principles for creating a better internet for children. It starts from the idea of a “Children’s Internet”, meaning the digital products, services and content that shape children’s online experiences, and argues that these should be designed around children’s rights, needs and development rather than treating children as an afterthought.

This 2026 joint statement calls on governments participating in the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance to place children’s rights and voices at the centre of international AI governance. Signed by more than 120 organisations and experts from across the world, it argues that existing commitments now need to be translated into concrete action through effective regulation, strong safeguards and meaningful accountability.

This 2024 Digital Futures for Children report examines whether regulation is leading technology companies to make concrete changes that improve children’s online privacy and safety. It reviews measures introduced by Meta, Google, TikTok and Snap between 2017 and 2024, against the backdrop of the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, the Online Safety Act, the EU Digital Services Act, GDPR and other regulatory frameworks.

This 2025 Digital Futures for Children report reviews how children are represented in digital transformation and digital inclusion policies around the world. Based on an analysis of more than 300 policies from 35 countries and organisations, it finds that children are often mentioned only in relation to education, skills or online safety, and are frequently treated either as future economic contributors or as vulnerable users in need of protection.

Eurochild’s 2025 position paper argues against blanket social media bans for children, warning that they can restrict children’s rights to information, expression, education and participation without necessarily making them safer. Instead, it calls for a child-rights-based approach combining safety-by-design, stronger platform accountability, digital literacy, and meaningful child participation in digital policy and service design.