Child Safety Becoming Issue for Governance, Not Just Products

A rising number of court rulings reflect judicial willingness to hold technology companies accountable for choosing platform designs alleged to harm children. That shift reflects a broader reality: As technology shapes nearly every aspect of childhood, safety, privacy, and accountability are no longer discretionary ethical considerations—they are baseline legal obligations.

Courts are applying classic product liability and tort principles to scrutinize whether companies design products in ways that create heightened risk for children and whether they adequately identify and mitigate those risks through their internal governance and decision-making processes. In response, companies have an opportunity to integrate child-centered safeguards directly into product design and governance rather than retrofit protections after harm to children occurs.

Child rights and safety impact assessments—due diligence frameworks rooted in established human rights norms and practices—offer companies a stable and effective compliance rubric for protecting the youngest users.

Child-Safety Compliance Challenges

Designing a compliance program that adheres to applicable child safety standards presents complexities. First, digital products and platforms’ risks to children don’t exist in isolation; they overlap and reinforce one another.

An algorithmically driven platform may amplify age-inappropriate content through recommendation systems designed to maximize engagement while collecting extensive data from minors to further personalize those recommendations. In this example, one product feature poses potential child safety, privacy, mental health, addictive design, and artificial intelligence governance concerns.

Second, children are still developing cognitively, emotionally, and socially, and they experience potential harms differently than adults. Features designed to increase engagement or extend time on a platform may pose minimal risk to older users but can have great effects on children’s mental health, sense of autonomy, ability to sleep, education, and overall well-being.

Age restrictions alone have proven insufficient. Companies must go further by explicitly identifying risks, assigning clear responsibilities, and embedding child safeguards into their governance frameworks from the outset, likely with input from child rights, safety, and technology experts.

At the same time, regulatory approaches remain fragmented across jurisdictions and technologies. Legislatures and regulators around the world are working to adopt different standards governing children’s privacy, online safety, age-appropriate design, platform accountability, and AI governance. This patchwork creates operational complexity, compliance challenges, litigation, and enforcement risk for companies operating globally.

In the absence of consistent standards, US courts are turning to familiar tort law concepts to examine whether companies knew, or should have known, about these risks to children. The recent trials against social media companies in California and New Mexico focus on evidence of corporate governance failures and decision-making lapses.

The juries in these cases were presented with internal emails, safety proposals, and decision memos, and concluded that executives understood the risks their products posed to children and deprioritized safety in favor of engagement. The New Mexico attorney general argued explicitly that the harms in that case resulted from a corporate philosophy that deliberately chose growth over children’s well-being.

Regardless of whether these outcomes hold merit, they send a strong signal to in-house lawyers and compliance professionals: companies that can demonstrate robust governance systems, documented risk assessment and mitigation efforts, ongoing monitoring, and responsible decision-making, will fare better when their corporate practices are challenged in court.

Child Impact Assessments

Process and governance-based frameworks, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and UNICEF’s Children’s Rights and Business Principles, offer a durable foundation for compliance because they aren’t tied to any single jurisdiction or regulatory regime. They also apply across technologies and systems that continue to evolve, making them less vulnerable to redundancy.

The UNGPs encourage ongoing human rights due diligence to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for adverse impacts. This increasingly takes the form of Digital Child Rights Impact Assessments, or D-CRIAs, which map how children interact with a product and identify risks tied to design, functionality, data practices, and business operations. Risks are prioritized by severity and likelihood, and solutions are proposed accordingly.

D-CRIAs create clear internal governance structures, assigning accountability, outlining decision-making authority, and forcing collaboration across teams that may otherwise operate in silos: legal, policy, and product. Because these assessments are process-based and focused on impacts rather than narrow technical categories, they are verifiable and easier to integrate across products and services. They prompt consideration of child-related risks throughout the product development process, rather than post-launch, which improves corporate decision-making at every step.

D-CRIAs also encourage companies to examine the potential offline supply chain risks affecting children across their operations. For example, the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure raises concerns about child labor risks tied to large scale construction and manufacturing. A comprehensive child-centered due diligence process helps companies evaluate these interconnected risks across their business.

From a litigation perspective, D-CRIAs provide a practical, scalable framework for evaluating foreseeable harms to children. They map directly to the concerns recent cases have surfaced. For example, to the extent courts focus on foreseeability a documented impact assessment shows that risks were identified and evaluated at the point of design.

They also memorialize proposed responses to risks, which fosters accountability. By requiring companies to document the reasoning behind design decisions, they create a contemporaneous record of good-faith due diligence. They shift child safety from a reactive legal defense into a proactive governance obligation, creating the structural change these verdicts are beginning to demand.

Key Takeaways

Recent litigation signals that child safety online has become a product liability and governance concern.

Restricting children’s access to technology in response to these outcomes is neither realistic nor necessarily in children’s best interests. Instead, we should ensure that innovation doesn’t come at the expense of children’s development, privacy, health, and well-being.

As technology continues to evolve faster than regulation, companies need stable compliance frameworks that can adapt across products, jurisdictions, and emerging risks.

Child rights impact assessments provide a structured way to identify foreseeable harms, document mitigation efforts, and embed accountability into decision-making. The companies that embrace these practices now will be best prepared to meet the legal, compliance, and societal expectations that are rapidly taking shape—and before they are imposed externally by courts.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Jessica Leinwand is general counsel of UNICEF USA and previously served as director of strategic counsel at Meta Platforms Inc. She is an adjunct professor on child rights and business at American University’s Washington College of Law.

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