Brazil's Child Online Safety Law Offers a Different Path Than Social Media Bans

Lorena Giuberti Coutinho is a commissioner at Brazil's National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) and a Professor at IDP in Brasília. She previously worked as an economist at the OECD and contributed to the initial phase of research behind Growing Up in the Social Media Age. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not represent the official position of the ANPD.

Governments around the world increasingly agree that children need greater protection online. Some have turned to age limits: Australia now requires users to be 16 to open a social media account, Britain has announced it will do the same, and other countries and a number of US states are weighing similar steps.

The worry is real and widely shared. Many online platforms were not built with children’s interests in mind, and families should not bear sole responsibility for managing the consequences. Brazil starts from the same premise and takes a parallel route. Rather than preventing teenagers from accessing social media, the country's new ECA Digital law (Law No. 15.211/2025) focuses on reducing the risks embedded in platform design. New evidence on how young people actually use these platforms helps explain why this approach deserves attention.

Start with a deceptively simple question: is the harm in using social media, or in using it too much? While most research finds that excessive social media use is associated with negative outcomes, establishing a causal relationship is quite complex. The OECD's new analysis of PISA 2022 data, Growing Up in the Social Media Age, sheds further light on this issue. Among 15-year-olds, mathematics performance is highest for those who use social media moderately; both non-users and heavy users perform worse. Performance remains high up to about three hours a day, after which it begins to fall. The paper carefully describes these as associations rather than proven causes: students who are already struggling may be more inclined towards heavier use. In any case, another finding that stands out from the data is how intensively young people use social media, which suggests intensity is a plausible factor for regulators to address.

Brazil's ECA Digital reflects a growing international consensus around the principle of "safe by design." Rather than placing the burden entirely on parents or children, the law requires platforms to anticipate foreseeable risks and build protections into their products from the outset. Article 17 of the law requires providers to set the highest level of protection as the default and to limit features designed to prolong use, such as autoplay, rewards for time spent and notifications. It rests on a well-documented behavioral bias: people tend to leave the default settings in place. While engagement-maximizing design exploits this inertia to prolong use, protective defaults direct it towards the best interests of the child. Therefore, the safe configuration is the one that users must opt out of rather than the one they must hunt for. The decree implementing the law goes further by naming specific mechanics and requiring services to prevent designs that encourage excessive, problematic, or compulsive use, such as infinite scrolling and excessive notifications.

Platform design also matters because of network effects. A recent NBER study by Leonardo Bursztyn, Cass Sunstein and several colleagues finds this makes behavior hard to shift one person at a time, since the pull to stay connected with friends keeps everyone in place. That is part of why acting on design matters: rules that change the product itself do not depend on each child choosing to step back, and so can complement measures that work on access. The two levers reach the problem from different sides.

The same body of work points to instruments acting on intensity: caps on time and designs that ease moderation, which curb heavy use while preserving the value of moderate use. Young people are receptive to this: asked to choose, 72% of under-16s preferred a tool that helps them limit their own use. Taken together, this growing body of evidence suggests that platform design should continue to deserve attention. Age restrictions and design obligations are complementary measures that can work together to improve children's safety online.

The online-safety laws now emerging share a common feature: they shift responsibility towards the providers who control the design of the platforms. This means that the burden should no longer be placed only on parents and children to compensate for services that were not designed with their safety in mind. The ECA Digital is built on the premise that it is still possible to strike a balance between preserving opportunities for children online and protecting them.

Whether other governments ultimately choose age restrictions, design regulation, or a combination of both, the emerging evidence points in the same direction. Safer digital environments are more likely to result from changing how platforms are built than from expecting children to navigate products optimized to keep them online.