Research & Commentary

Age assurance is entering a new phase. From the recent multistate Meta settlement and California legislation to New York’s final SAFE for Kids Act rules, broad requirements to protect youth online are now being translated into concrete requirements for how companies determine users’ ages, measure whether their systems work, and demonstrate compliance. As these implementation frameworks take shape, New York’s approach offers important early lessons for policymakers across jurisdictions developing their own age assurance rules.

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.

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.

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.

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.