Seventy-seven statutes, regulations and bills governing minors' access to digital services. For each one: who it covers and where that definition comes from, what it requires, and where it stands — with the official source and a recent account of that same status kept apart.
How to read the sources
- Statutory text, official gazette, regulator or parliamentary record.
- Specialist tracker or law-firm analysis: a paraphrase of the statutory text.
- Press: good for dating an event. What an instrument says comes from the official source.
About this inventory
Over the last decade, and far more intensely since 2023, legislatures have begun treating digital platforms the way they treat a harmful product: set a minimum age, require that it be verified, prohibit particular design features, mandate warnings. This inventory collects the instruments that express that turn and sorts them along two axes — whether they ban access or nudge it in a direction, and by which concrete mechanism.
The distinction matters because public debate uses “ban” for the whole set. Most of these instruments work by other means: age verification, parental consent, default settings, warnings. Each mechanism carries its own costs and its own constitutional objections.
Why the sources are kept apart
Each entry says where every claim comes from. That an instrument reaches “social media platforms” may be stated in the statutory text, in a code issued by a regulator, in a law firm’s paraphrase, or in a newspaper’s account. Each is cited differently and supports a claim of different reach.
The same goes for status. Every instrument carries two separate links — the official source and a recent account of that same status — because a statute can be formally in force and judicially enjoined at the same time, or enacted and not yet operative.
Where the research contradicts the classification we started from, the entry says so. Three concrete cases: Korea’s shutdown law was listed as in force and was in fact repealed at the end of 2021; England’s school phone guidance was listed as guidance and has been statutory since June 2026; and Louisiana’s app-store act (HB 570) was repealed and replaced by HB 977 in May 2026, with an effective date now in 2027.
Caveats
- “In force” describes formal standing. Enforcement is tracked separately: several instruments operate without a single recorded enforcement action.
- For partly enjoined statutes, cite the specific provision. California’s
SB 976is the clearest case: within the same text, some sections operate and others are enjoined. - Scope for US state statutes is taken from Orrick’s tracker and shown in English without translation. It is the tracker’s paraphrase; the statutory text sits behind the official link in each entry.