The Internet Isn’t Safe For Young People. Big Tech Designed It This Way.

In acknowledgement of Social Media Victims Remembrance Day, youth advocate Isabel Sunderland has penned this impactful piece.

Isabel shared the stage with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at Project Healthy Minds World Mental Health Day Festival.

She is a Policy Lead for the Technology Reform program at Issue One, a leading cross-partisan political reform group in Washington, DC. There, she works to advance state and federal policies on child safety, platform design, Section 230, data privacy, and national security, advocating for stronger regulations on Big Tech.

In addition to her work at Issue One, Isabel is actively involved with Design It For Us, a youth-led movement pushing for safer social media to protect kids, teens, and young adults online. She leads state and federal lobbying efforts for the coalition and has advocated on Capitol Hill, before state lawmakers, and in the White House for kids’ online safety.


By Isabel Sunderland, Youth Advocate and Policy Expert

The UK government’s proposed social media ban for young people, and the broader global trend behind it, signals that the cultural tide has begun to turn against Big Tech’s unchecked power. For years, the public has been locked in a protracted debate over whether online harms even exist; all while the industry has aggressively scaled without guardrails in sight. Today, that era is ending. Now, the question is no longer about if we should regulate these digital spaces, but rather how. That shift alone is progress.

However, while a ban is an understandable — and often well-intentioned — response, it is a false panacea. It dangerously treats the symptom while missing the root cause of online harm. Social media can be a positive force: connecting people, communities, and ideas; empowering young people with access to information; and offering new pathways to civic participation. Cutting off that access lets tech companies off the hook and shifts responsibility away from the executives that designed the spaces to be harmful and instead onto the young people navigating them. Bans fail to answer the deeper, systemic question: Why have these companies been allowed to build such hostile products, that a total ban often feels like the only defense? 

The core issue is not youth exposure. It is predatory design.

The harms young people face online are not accidental byproducts of an industry innovating for good. They are the result of a series of deliberate design decisions, made by tech executives, to keep users online for as long as possible. Recommendation algorithms, push notifications, infinite scroll, disappearing content, and other engagement-maximizing features are engineered to exploit human psychology. Before toxic content ever reaches a young person, a calculated notification has already lured them back to the screen. 

Today, tech companies are not merely hosting digital public squares, they are actively monetizing attention spans and building addictive environments designed to siphon attention at the absolute expense of user wellbeing.

This is not a partisan issue, a cultural war, a generational battle, or a fight against innovation. Nor is it facing one nation alone. Ensuring the safety of young generations is a fundamental global responsibility. Yet, tech giants deploy vast war chests into lobbying policymakers around the world to settle for cosmetic reforms that fail to confront the root incentives. No other industry enjoys this blank-check, lack-of-accountability. 

To dismantle Big Tech’s flawed architecture, legislation must strike at the heart of its business model — and for that, digital natives must be in the room.

Including young people at the table when crafting policy is a prerequisite for serious online reform. As digital natives, we intrinsically understand how these companies capture attention, prey on personal vulnerability, and chip away at autonomy because we have grown up inside the systems that lawmakers are now scrambling to regulate. We know, for example, that the answer is not to ban young people from digital spaces, but rather to compel Big Tech to redesign those spaces, so they are no longer intentionally built to exploit anyone, anywhere, at any age. 

Young leaders are already offering practical blueprints for this future. The youth-led coalition Design It For Us, for example, has launched a Youth AI Policy Framework that demands an overhaul of how we approach tech regulation. Implementing this framework as a non-negotiable baseline would force real accountability and move us past a perfunctory patchwork of reactionary bans that merely delay meaningful change.

Serious reform starts by putting the burden where it belongs: on the companies that design these defective products, not on the young people and parents forced to defend themselves against each new addictive design decision, opaque algorithm, or profit-driven update. Companies should be required to assess risks before launching new features, limit manipulative design, protect young users by default, and open their black boxes to meaningful oversight. Transparency cannot be voluntary. Companies should have to disclose how their systems recommend content, amplify harm, target young users, and measure engagement. This also means integrating safe tech in education through clear, corporate-free guidance, and ensuring that emerging systems are used to enhance, rather than replace, foundational human skills.

Bans limit access, but safety by design addresses the root conditions that made access feel dangerous in the first place. As AI systems already begin to expose young users to new risks, policymakers have a narrow window to correct the mistakes of the social media era before they are hardwired into the next generation of technology. Big Tech has shown us that it needs to be regulated and will not act on its own. As these new tech companies emerge, they will point to this lack of rules as a reason they’re not responsible for the damage they cause. The lesson from the social media era, reinforced in global conversations at G7, is that voluntary accountability cannot be the foundation for protecting users. Decades of unchecked growth has made one thing clear: this industry will not self-correct. As new companies emerge, they will point to the absence of enforceable rules as reason enough to evade responsibility for the harm they cause. Conversations at the G7 and beyond have underscored what advocates have long known: voluntary commitments are not a foundation for protecting users. They are a delay tactic.

If our collective ambition begins and ends with restricting access, we allow Big Tech to escape the responsibility of a public-health crisis that their products produce. The future we are fighting for is not one with less technology or less innovation. It is one where tech companies are firmly held to a higher standard of design and accountability. That future starts with young people at the table, and with laws that make safety the first obligation of design — not the last excuse for a ban. 

All views reflected here are Isabel’s alone and do not necessarily represent the views of her affiliated organizations.