Hi everyone, The Center for Democracy & Technology recently published a new research report led by my colleagues Michal Luria and Aliya Bhatia called "What Kids and Parents Want: Policy Insights for Social Media Safety Features <https://cdt.org/insights/what-kids-and-parents-want-policy-insights-for-social-media-safety-features/>." It goes a long way in helping us understand what parents and their children think about policy proposals in the U.S. to keep children safe online and how they work in practice. Based on research with 45 parents and their children they found: ➡️ Age Verification: ID-based and face scanning methods were viewed as invasive and unreliable. Participants favored parent-centered approaches which enabled parents to declare their children’s age and consent to which apps their children downloaded. This finding emphasized parents’ desire for choice and flexibility when approaching age verification, in part to address privacy and security concerns. ➡️ Algorithmic Feed Controls: Teens expressed trust in algorithmic feeds and little interest in chronological alternatives. They preferred lightweight controls such as “not interested” functions over disruptive pop-ups, while parents expressed a desire for more tools to set content boundaries. ➡️ Screen-Time Features: Teens and parents valued reminders and parent-led limits, but opposed app-enforced, peer-enforced or content-based restrictions. Strict curfews were considered intrusive and impractical, suggesting more flexibility could be built into screen-time features. ➡️ Parental Access: Teens were mostly open to parental visibility but strongly opposed parental ability to delete content or apps without their explicit consent. Parents agreed, and both also said that parental approval for significant actions (e.g., downloading a new social media platform) is appropriate, while everyday approvals (e.g., adding a contact or joining a group) seem excessive and unnecessary. The employed a qualitative design research approach called speed dating with storyboards. They used a set of storyboard illustrations to depict how child digital safety policy proposals might work in practice. This allowed participants to think through how the proposed interventions would impact their own lives and experiences. You can find the report here: https://cdt.org/insights/what-kids-and-parents-want-policy-insights-for-soci... take care, Dhanaraj -- *Dhanaraj Thakur* (he/him) | Research Director Center for Democracy & Technology |*cdt.org <https://cdt.org/>* **dthakur@cdt.org | **+1 202 407 8849