Social Media Kids’ Safety Tools are Falling Short: Our New Report

 By Lexie Matsumoto, Laura Edelson, and Damon McCoy

June 29, 2026

Is social media safe enough for kids? Not only do parents ask this question when making the important decision to let their children use social media products, but regulators and courts around the world are asking as well. With little transparency into these companies’ platforms and business practices, most rely on marketing claims from these companies about how safe their products are and what tools exist on their platforms to safeguard children. These claims have not been independently verified, and we aimed to close that gap. We audited Instagram’s child safety tools for a report we co-authored in September, 2025. And today we released Broken, Buried, or Missing: Anatomies of Failure (and Success) of Social Media Child Safety Features, the first independent audit of advertised child safety tools from four major platforms: Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. 

In a New York Times article today about our findings, the report co-author and CRC researcher Lexie Matsumoto explained that the research “highlights the gulf between the companies’ assurances about child safety and the experience of parents and teens online. [We] combed through hundreds of company statements about the features and found that the language often implied that the platforms were doing much more to prevent harm than they actually were.”

We evaluated these tools the same way you crash test a car- we created test accounts on the products and interacted with the tools in the exact same environment a child would. We evaluated each feature by asking two very simple questions: does it work as described, and can a child easily use it? By these criteria, we find that nearly 60% of features failed (51 of 86 tested).

When social media companies publicly promise that their products restrict adults from messaging their children, that a teen is restricted from searching for self-harm or disordered eating content, or that they facilitate healthy screen time behavior, a parent has little alternative but to take them at their word. We found severe disparities between some advertised claims and the reality of safety tools on every product we tested. Unfortunately, this means that parents who rely on the company’s public messaging about their products to make informed choices have little way of knowing which claims they can trust and which they cannot.

We believe that children face real risks online and that their safety, especially on social media, should be taken seriously. Across a wide range of fields, from car makers to pharmaceutical companies, corporations have responsibilities to be transparent to consumers about the risks their products pose. Social media companies should be no exception. And further, companies that actively market their products to children, or market safety features designed to protect them, should be held to this same standard of accuracy.

There were bright spots, and we discussed these in our report as examples of what child safety on social media can look like. Better, safer social media is possible, but much more work remains to be done. We hope our report can be an important step in the long journey toward safer social media products for children. 

Find the full report here.

To see coverage of our findings by the New York Times, click here, and CNN's coverage here.