UN Issues 10-Point Guidelines to Protect Children Online
The United Nations Human Rights Office on Friday released a set of 10 guidelines calling on governments and technology companies to do more to protect children from harm on digital platforms. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk issued the guidelines — titled Getting Children’s Safety Online Right — from Frankfurt, arguing that online dangers to children are the direct result of deliberate design choices by tech firms, not an unavoidable feature of the internet.
Turk said states had to force tech giants to embed child safety and said child harm was the direct result of business practices and design choices. His statement named specific platform features as part of the problem. “Online harms to kids’ safety, privacy and wellbeing are not innate or inevitable; they result from design choices and business practices that undermine safety, including addictive design features, such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and persistent notifications from apps,” Turk said. The StandardThe Standard
The High Commissioner left no doubt about the scale of the challenge. “Enhancing protection of children online is an urgent priority that we need to make sure not only gets done — but that it gets done right,” he said in a statement. Arab News
Bans alone are not enough
A central argument in the UN report is that age-based social media bans — increasingly popular with governments across Europe and beyond — do not address the underlying problem. Turk said simply focusing on age restrictions would leave unaltered the designs and algorithms that made platforms unsafe in the first place. Tech giants must embed safety “by design, instead of shifting the burden to parents and children,” he said. The Standard
The risk of pushing children elsewhere was also flagged. Turk said experience so far showed that bans could be easily circumvented and voiced concern that such bans could even end up pushing children to riskier, even less monitored platforms. The Standard
“Blanket social media bans are not a one-off panacea,” Turk said. “Simply limiting access to platforms that remain unsafe cannot stand as the endpoint in effectively protecting children.” The Standard
He called instead for platforms to be made safer by design, for data to be protected, and for those responsible for harm to be held to account. The Standard
What the 10 guidelines require
The guidelines set out specific obligations for both governments and technology companies. They included ensuring the maximum protection of children’s data as a default setting, while the micro-targeting of children for commercial purposes, based on a digital record, should not be permitted. The Standard
The guidelines also said emerging concerns such as restrictions on artificial intelligence chatbot use or addictive design features may warrant age restrictions. They require that any such measures be subject to independent oversight, with legal consequences designed to act as deterrents, and that children whose rights are violated must have access to remedy. The Standard
The full list of obligations, as set out by the UN Human Rights Office, requires platforms to reduce addictive design features and restrict children-oriented marketing; to protect children’s rights to information and expression; to adopt privacy protections by default; to conduct child rights impact assessments; to ensure that age verification systems themselves meet privacy standards; to tailor any age-based restrictions to specific, well-defined harms; to include children’s voices in shaping digital regulation; to publish transparent reports on design and data practices; to enforce accountability through independent oversight and legal penalties; and to support ongoing research to assess what approaches work.
Turk also warned that poorly designed safeguards could themselves create risks. “Whatever regulations are adopted, it is essential to avoid inadvertently causing further harms. For example, age verification done wrong can both fail at its goal and endanger the privacy of both kids and adults,” he said. The Standard
Regional and global significance
The guidelines arrive as governments in multiple countries are actively debating or implementing restrictions on children’s social media use. France passed legislation in 2026 aimed at banning social network access for those under 15, and similar debates are ongoing across Europe, Australia, and the United States.
The UN Human Rights Office’s position — that design accountability must sit with platforms, not with parents or children — puts it directly at odds with the approach taken by many technology companies, which have generally argued that parental controls and age verification are sufficient responses to concerns about child safety. The guidelines, while not legally binding on member states, carry weight as the formal position of the UN’s top human rights body and are likely to inform legislative debates in multiple jurisdictions.
The report’s explicit reference to AI chatbots as a category requiring age-based attention marks the first time the UN Human Rights Office has named AI as a specific area of concern in the context of child online safety guidelines.
Background
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by 196 countries, establishes the international legal framework for children’s rights, including in digital environments. In 2021, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child issued guidance on children’s rights in relation to digital environments, but it stopped short of prescribing specific design obligations for technology companies. Friday’s guidelines go further, naming platform architecture — autoplay, infinite scroll, persistent notifications — as a rights issue rather than a product decision. The UN Human Rights Office, based in Geneva, is led by Volker Turk, who became High Commissioner in 2022. His office has increasingly focused on the intersection of technology and human rights, including the use of AI in surveillance and the regulation of digital platforms.
What happens next
The guidelines are not legally binding, but the UN Human Rights Office has called on governments to use them as a basis for national legislation and regulatory frameworks. Independent oversight bodies are expected to be a key mechanism for enforcement where governments act on the recommendations. Technology companies will face pressure to demonstrate, through the transparency reporting the guidelines require, that their platforms are moving toward the safety-by-design standard. The guidelines also formally call for children’s participation in shaping regulatory responses, a step that would require governments and companies to create structured mechanisms for that input. No implementation timeline has been set by the UN Human Rights Office.
