Global policy report urges binding state duty to protect children online

A global policy report covering 40 countries, titled Prevention By Design: From Voluntary Self-Regulation to a State Duty of Care and launched on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 24 September 2026, urges governments to move from voluntary industry safeguards towards binding legal duties to protect children online, backing prevention-by-design, privacy-preserving age checks and school smartphone restrictions. The analysis points to growing government action on children's access to social media, with Australia, China, Indonesia and Malaysia already enforcing binding age rules, four other countries having passed legislation, 11 bills before parliaments, and 22 governments actively considering regulatory measures, and recommends that legal obligations and penalties be attached to digital platforms, never to the child or parent.

Prevention by design operates most effectively when detection occurs at the point of individual contact rather than at the platform perimeter. Guardii intercepts grooming, sextortion and CSAM exchange including AI-generated material in children's direct-message conversations in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms by detecting harmful patterns of sustained targeting, escalation and coercion, blocking hostile contact before it reaches the target and surfacing a child in crisis to a parent, school or professional. The technology enables rapid escalation to the right authority in an emergency, implementing prevention by design at the layer where a child experiences the threat, detecting the pattern of abuse rather than waiting for voluntary industry safeguards or binding platform-level obligations to take effect, and closing the operational gap between state duty of care frameworks and the individual child at risk.