Bill Ready, the chief executive of Pinterest, isn’t known for making waves in Washington. His platform — a digital pinboard for recipes, home décor ideas, and wedding inspiration — rarely draws the same scrutiny as Meta’s Instagram or TikTok. But Ready has now staked out one of the most aggressive positions of any tech CEO on the question of children and social media: ban them.
Not restrict. Not gate. Ban.
In a recent interview with Mashable, Ready said he supports legislation that would prohibit children under 16 from using social media platforms entirely. “I think there should be an age limit for social media, and I think it should be 16,” Ready told the publication. He went further, arguing that the current patchwork of parental consent requirements and age-verification half-measures has failed to protect young users from the well-documented harms of excessive social media use.
The statement lands at a moment of unusual bipartisan momentum. Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have spent the past year escalating their rhetoric about children’s online safety, and multiple bills are advancing through committee. Australia has already passed a law banning social media for children under 16, set to take effect later this year. The European Union is tightening its own rules. And in the United States, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called for warning labels on social media platforms, comparing the mental health crisis among young people to the public health emergency that once surrounded tobacco.
Ready’s comments position Pinterest as something rare in Silicon Valley: a platform willing to support regulation that could, in theory, shrink its own user base.
Why Pinterest Is a Different Kind of Tech Company in This Fight
Pinterest has long occupied an unusual niche. It doesn’t have a messaging feature in the traditional sense. It doesn’t have the algorithmic feed of short-form video that has made TikTok and Instagram Reels so addictive to teenagers. Its core product — saving and organizing visual content — is closer to a bookmarking tool than a social network, though the company does enable comments, follows, and content recommendations driven by machine learning. Ready has been making this distinction for years, often positioning Pinterest as an “inspiration platform” rather than a social media company.
That positioning matters here. If a federal age ban were enacted, Pinterest might argue — and regulators might agree — that its product falls outside the definition of social media covered by the law. Ready has hinted at as much, telling Mashable that Pinterest is “not the place where the most harm is happening” but that he still supports a blanket approach to protect kids. It’s a politically savvy stance: call for broad regulation that would hit your competitors hardest while burnishing your own reputation as a responsible actor.
But there’s more to it than strategy. Pinterest has invested in child safety features over the past several years, including restrictions on ads targeting teens and a ban on weight-loss advertising aimed at minors. The company says it uses a combination of age-gating at sign-up and behavioral signals to try to keep underage users off the platform, though like every other tech company, it acknowledges these measures are imperfect.
Ready’s willingness to speak bluntly about age restrictions also reflects a growing consensus among some tech leaders that self-regulation has hit a wall. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, has been the primary federal law governing children’s data and online access since 1998. It requires parental consent for data collection from children under 13. Almost no one in the industry believes it works as intended. Kids routinely lie about their age. Parents click through consent forms without reading them. And the law hasn’t been meaningfully updated in over two decades.
“COPPA is a 20th-century law trying to govern a 21st-century problem,” said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on children and commercial media. Multiple legislative proposals — including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act — aim to update or replace the existing framework, though none have yet reached the president’s desk.
The Kids Online Safety Act, which passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support last year, would require platforms to enable the strongest privacy settings by default for users under 17 and give parents new tools to supervise their children’s accounts. Critics, including some civil liberties organizations, have warned that the bill’s requirement for platforms to mitigate harm to minors could lead to excessive content censorship or restrict access to information about sensitive topics like LGBTQ+ issues and reproductive health. The bill’s sponsors have made revisions to address those concerns, but the debate continues.
Meanwhile, state-level action has accelerated. Utah, Texas, Florida, and several other states have passed or proposed laws requiring age verification, parental consent, or outright bans on social media use by minors. Florida’s law, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, prohibits children under 14 from having social media accounts and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds. A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of the law on First Amendment grounds, a legal challenge that underscores the constitutional complexity of age-based internet restrictions.
Australia’s approach has been the most sweeping. Its Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, passed in late 2024, imposes a blanket ban on social media accounts for anyone under 16, with platforms — not parents — bearing the responsibility for enforcement. The law includes fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars for companies that fail to comply. Tech companies have pushed back, arguing that reliable age verification is technically difficult without invasive data collection, such as requiring government-issued identification or biometric scans.
This is the central tension. Everyone agrees, at least rhetorically, that kids should be safer online. The disagreement is over how to accomplish that without creating new privacy risks, restricting speech, or building surveillance infrastructure that could be repurposed for other ends.
Ready’s position — a hard age cutoff at 16, enforced by platforms — sidesteps some of these nuances. It’s clean. It’s quotable. And it aligns Pinterest with the growing political consensus without requiring the company to disclose exactly how it would verify ages in practice.
Meta, for its part, has taken a different tack. The company announced earlier this year that it would implement “teen accounts” on Instagram with default restrictions on content, messaging, and notifications for users under 16. Mark Zuckerberg has said he supports federal legislation on age verification, effectively asking Congress to create a standard rather than leaving each platform to build its own system. Snap has introduced parental controls and time-management tools. TikTok has automatic screen-time limits for users under 18. None of these companies have endorsed a full ban.
The industry’s reluctance is partly commercial. Teenagers are a coveted demographic. They set trends, drive viral content, and represent future lifetime users. Losing them for even a few years could reshape a platform’s culture and advertiser appeal. But the reluctance is also practical. No age-verification technology currently exists that is simultaneously reliable, privacy-preserving, and resistant to circumvention. Kids who want to get around a ban will find ways to do so, just as they’ve been lying about their ages on the internet since the internet began.
Ready seems to acknowledge this. In his Mashable interview, he didn’t claim that a ban would be perfectly enforceable. Instead, he argued that setting a clear legal standard would shift the burden of responsibility onto platforms and give regulators a framework for accountability. “It’s about creating the right norms,” he said.
That framing echoes what public health advocates have been saying for years. Dr. Murthy’s call for warning labels was explicitly modeled on the tobacco precedent — not because warning labels eliminated smoking, but because they changed the cultural conversation and created legal liability. A social media age ban, even an imperfect one, could function similarly: a signal from society that exposing young children to algorithmically optimized content streams is a recognized harm, not just a parenting choice.
The research backing these concerns has grown substantially. A 2023 advisory from the Surgeon General’s office cited studies linking heavy social media use among adolescents to increased rates of anxiety, depression, and body image disorders. A longitudinal study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that adolescents who spent more than three hours per day on social media faced double the risk of poor mental health outcomes. And internal documents from Meta, leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, showed that the company’s own researchers had found Instagram was harmful to a significant percentage of teenage girls, particularly around issues of body image and social comparison.
Not all researchers agree on the magnitude of the effect. Some, including psychologist Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute, have argued that the correlation between social media use and mental health problems is modest and that other factors — economic stress, academic pressure, social isolation during the pandemic — play larger roles. The debate is genuine and ongoing. But the political momentum has clearly shifted toward action.
So where does this leave Pinterest? Ready has placed a bet that being on the right side of the children’s safety debate will pay dividends in public trust and regulatory goodwill. It costs Pinterest relatively little to support a ban that would primarily affect competitors with younger user bases. And it gives the company a moral high ground that’s increasingly valuable as Washington moves toward legislation.
Whether that legislation actually materializes is another question. Congress has a long history of holding dramatic hearings about tech’s impact on children — complete with tearful parent testimony and stern questioning of CEOs — and then failing to pass anything. The current session has more momentum than most, but the constitutional questions around age verification and free speech remain unresolved. Courts will have the final say.
For now, Ready’s declaration is a marker. A tech CEO saying, plainly and publicly, that children under 16 shouldn’t be on social media. No hedging about parental tools or age-appropriate experiences. Just a line in the sand.
It’s a small thing. It might also be the beginning of something much larger.
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