[Air-L] New CDT report - "What Kids and Parents Want: Policy Insights for Social Media Safety Features."

[Dhanaraj Thakur]

Hi everyone,

The Center for Democracy & Technology recently published a new research 
report led by my colleagues Michal Luria and Aliya Bhatia called "What 
Kids and Parents Want: Policy Insights for Social Media Safety Features 
<https://cdt.org/insights/what-kids-and-parents-want-policy-insights-for-social-media-safety-features/>." 
It goes a long way in helping us understand what parents and their 
children think about policy proposals in the U.S. to keep children safe 
online and how they work in practice.

Based on research with 45 parents and their children they found:

➡️ Age Verification: ID-based and face scanning methods were viewed as 
invasive and unreliable. Participants favored parent-centered approaches 
which enabled parents to declare their children’s age and consent to 
which apps their children downloaded. This finding emphasized parents’ 
desire for choice and flexibility when approaching age verification, in 
part to address privacy and security concerns.
➡️ Algorithmic Feed Controls: Teens expressed trust in algorithmic feeds 
and little interest in chronological alternatives. They preferred 
lightweight controls such as “not interested” functions over disruptive 
pop-ups, while parents expressed a desire for more tools to set content 
boundaries.
➡️ Screen-Time Features: Teens and parents valued reminders and 
parent-led limits, but opposed app-enforced, peer-enforced or 
content-based restrictions. Strict curfews were considered intrusive and 
impractical, suggesting more flexibility could be built into screen-time 
features.
➡️ Parental Access: Teens were mostly open to parental visibility but 
strongly opposed parental ability to delete content or apps without 
their explicit consent. Parents agreed, and both also said that parental 
approval for significant actions (e.g., downloading a new social media 
platform) is appropriate, while everyday approvals (e.g., adding a 
contact or joining a group) seem excessive and unnecessary.

The employed a qualitative design research approach called speed dating 
with storyboards. They used a set of storyboard illustrations to depict 
how child digital safety policy proposals might work in practice. This 
allowed participants to think through how the proposed interventions 
would impact their own lives and experiences.

You can find the report here: 
https://cdt.org/insights/what-kids-and-parents-want-policy-insights-for-social-media-safety-features/ 



take care,

Dhanaraj


-- 

*Dhanaraj Thakur* (he/him) | Research Director
Center for Democracy & Technology |*cdt.org <https://cdt.org/>*
**dthakur at cdt.org | **+1 202 407 8849