KGI brings scientific evidence and technical expertise to the critical design and regulatory choices shaping youth online safety. From age assurance and safer platform design to measuring online harms and developing remedies for social media and AI chatbots, we translate research into practical tools, frameworks, and guidance for policymakers, regulators, courts, and companies. Our work focuses on turning evidence into action to ensure protections for young people are technically sound, effective in practice, and grounded in how digital products actually work.
Young people are growing up in an online environment that is being remade in real time. Social media and AI increasingly shape how they learn, socialize, and see themselves, while exposing them to risks ranging from compulsive and addictive use to emotional manipulation and dependency, harmful contact and content, and the erosion of trustworthy information.
At the same time, a real opportunity for meaningful accountability is opening. Around the world a broad policy consensus has formed around the need for stronger protections for minors, even as the hard questions of how to deliver them remain unresolved. In the United States, a growing wave of litigation on behalf of youth and families has begun to pry open how companies build these products, what their executives know about their impacts, and how they can remedy harms. In the European Union, the enforcement apparatus of the Digital Services Act is maturing into a genuine check on company conduct.
As governments, regulators, and courts move from debating whether stronger protections are needed to determining how they should work in practice, the quality of implementation will determine whether these interventions meaningfully reduce harm.
KGI brings technical and scientific rigor to that challenge. Our work on youth online safety brings the best available evidence to the concrete choices facing companies, courts, and regulators, translating research into product designs and policies that measurably improve young people’s online experiences. From age assurance rules implementation to evidence-based remedies to address social media and AI chatbots harms, we develop practical tools, frameworks, and guidance that help ensure youth online safety is grounded in science, technical reality, and product design.
KGI maintains a laser focus on turning evidence and implementation experience into action. As young people’s use of AI and social media continues to evolve, the tools needed to measure harms, hold companies accountable, and translate evidence into effective product design and policy remain underdeveloped. Our work addresses these critical gaps by strengthening the evidence base and convening the experts needed to make the online environment safer for young people.
Our youth online safety work includes:
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KGI’s Age Assurance Rules provides practical recommendations for designing age assurance rules that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, service availability, competition, and openness.
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KGI’s Assigning Responsibility for Age Assurance examines how policymakers can allocate responsibility for age assurance across the digital ecosystem. It provides practical recommendations for assigning age assurance obligations in ways that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, competition, accessibility, and openness.
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KGI’s Measuring Risk II report examines what EU risk assessments and US litigation reveal about Snap and YouTube’s approaches to risks on their platforms, with a particular focus on risks to minors. The report explores the gap between what these platforms publicly disclose about risk mitigation and what has emerged through discovery in US litigation, including their own internal research, product development, and risk evaluation.
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As lawsuits involving AI, social media, privacy, competition, and platform accountability expand worldwide, courts are emerging as central actors shaping technology governance. A new tech litigation tracker developed by the Knight-Georgetown Institute, Tech Justice Law, and Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture & Technology program centralizes and tracks technology-related litigation and regulatory actions across jurisdictions and issue areas.
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As social media and generative AI chatbot lawsuits in the United States proceed to discovery and trial, courts are emerging as central actors in shaping technology governance, platform accountability, and online safety. A new report by the Knight-Georgetown Institute, Tech Justice Law, and the USC Marshall School Neely Center provides a practical, evidence-based framework to help courts, litigators, and policymakers craft effective and enforceable remedies for harms associated with social media platforms and AI chatbots.
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In its first full year in operation, KGI made its mark across technology policy venues and outlets. Through expert-led, evidence-based work, KGI helped inform policy approaches to algorithmic feed design, researcher access to data, and competition enforcement in the search market – demonstrating how independent research can shape real-world decisions in the United States and Europe.
