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Think Tank warns against rushing under-16 social media ban
(Kaieteur News) – As Guyana consults on its Child Online Safety and Ethical Technology Framework, which proposes an under-16 social media ban, Think Tank Abrams & Associates Research is urging a tactical pause. In their policy brief, “Education Before Regulation,” researchers Karen Abrams and Salima Bacchus-Hinds argue the state is rushing into intrusive territory without vital local data, warning that Guyana must “measure before it mandates.”
While validating the government’s goal of child protection, the firm flags mandatory age verification as the least reversible, most intrusive element of the package.
Dr. Karen Abrams
The brief highlights a major blind spot: Guyana lacks a comprehensive national study on youth digital habits. Relying on foreign assumptions ignores local realities. For many children in interior regions, the “binding constraint is a lack of digital access rather than digital excess.” Sweeping restrictions risk crowding out critical developmental goals like equitable access and digital literacy. Guyana isn’t legislating in a vacuum. Australia’s under-16 social media ban took effect in late 2025, providing a live test case. It has already revealed massive administrative burdens and unresolved privacy issues.
Furthermore, the boundary between social media and “social gaming” has dissolved. Australia exempted massive platforms like Roblox and Discord, spaces heavily occupied by youth where documented grooming occurs, meaning the law sorts by arbitrary category labels rather than actual risk. Evasion is also a given. With AI-assisted “vibe coding,” a motivated teenager can stand up a self-hosted chat network in an afternoon, bypassing corporate regulations entirely. To catch evaders, the state hits a penalty trap: either penalise families or force population-wide identity tracking.
Mandating identity verification introduces severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities, exposing citizens to potential data breaches and the insidious threat of “function creep.” This historical pattern occurs when databases built for a benign, single purpose are slowly expanded over time into sweeping tools for state monitoring and secondary surveillance. Whether the state relies on identity document checks, facial age estimation, or third-party vendors, the system inevitably collects and stores highly sensitive personal data without clear guardrails on who can access it or where it will live.
To avoid building this intrusive tracking infrastructure, the think tank outlines a sequenced alternative that shifts the focus toward education and evidence. The roadmap begins with conducting a National Child Online Safety Baseline Study alongside an independent Privacy Impact Assessment to evaluate the true scale of online harms and technical risks. Rather than waiting on future study findings, the state can immediately deploy “no-regret” interventions, such as embedding digital safety and privacy awareness directly into the school curriculum and launching localised education programs for parents.
The final phases of the strategy demand administrative discipline and strict legal boundaries. State child-protection services must be reinforced with specialised counselling to support children currently experiencing harm, treating the issue as a social welfare priority rather than a technical filtering problem. If age verification is pursued, it should be piloted on a strictly limited geographic and duration scale while continuously analysing Australia’s real-world data. Most importantly, hard legal protections must be established before any system goes live, creating strict statutory limits on data retention and an independent oversight body to ensure policy rests on evolving local evidence.
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