In the wake of the Australian government's landmark social media ban prohibiting users under the age of 16 from accessing major platforms, policymakers across the globe are actively exploring comparable legislative measures within their own jurisdictions.
Now, these deliberating governments have gained an unexpected — and arguably influential — advocate: the chief executive of one of the world's most widely used visual discovery platforms.
In a guest column published in Time, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready has voiced unequivocal support for government-enforced restrictions on social media access for minors under 16 — a stance that carries considerable weight given his position at the helm of a platform with hundreds of millions of active users.
"Children today are living through the largest social experiment in history," Ready writes. "For years, kids around the world have been given unfiltered access to social media platforms. The companies building these platforms gave insufficient forethought about the consequences, the worst of which include exposing them to unknown strangers and fueling screen addictions."
Ready further catalogs a broader spectrum of documented harms that unchecked social media exposure has inflicted on younger users, citing "rising anxiety and depression, eroding concentration, and classrooms competing for attention" as hallmarks of a generation navigating digital environments that were never purpose-built with their developmental needs in mind.
At the core of Ready's argument is a fundamental indictment of how social media products are architected. He contends that these platforms are engineered primarily to "maximize view time" among young users, with their underlying algorithms treating engagement as the paramount metric — often to the direct detriment of adolescent well-being. In a pointed historical parallel, Ready compares today's tech industry leadership to tobacco executives of prior decades, drawing a sharp line between prioritizing commercial growth and acknowledging product-related harms.
The critique does invite scrutiny, however. Pinterest's own terms of service permit users as young as 13 to register on the platform — a tension Ready addresses directly. He points to a suite of platform-level modifications Pinterest has implemented for users under 16: the removal of all social engagement features, the default setting of private profiles, and the complete restriction of inbound interactions such as messages, comments, and likes from unknown accounts. In effect, Pinterest has repositioned its under-16 experience as a closed, discovery-oriented environment rather than a social network in the traditional sense.
What makes Ready's argument particularly compelling from a product strategy standpoint is the counterintuitive outcome these changes produced. Rather than alienating a key growth demographic, the restrictions appear to have deepened platform affinity among younger users.
"When Pinterest removed social features for teens and made every account under 16 private…people said we’d lose the next generation of users," Ready writes. "But Gen Z says the opposite. Today, they make up over 50 percent of our users. Our experience shows that prioritizing safety and well-being doesn’t push young people away; it builds trust."
Ready extends his argument beyond Pinterest's own platform experience, issuing a broader industry challenge: if technology companies are unwilling to self-regulate in meaningful ways, they should expect governments to fill that vacuum through binding legislation. In that context, Ready expressed support for the App Store Accountability Act, a proposed piece of U.S. legislation that would mandate age verification at the point of app download within major app store ecosystems — effectively shifting some of the verification burden upstream to distribution platforms rather than individual applications.
"The cost of inaction is a generation of young people overwhelmed by anxiety and depression," Ready writes. "It’s time to raise the bar on safety and well-being for kids. We need clearer rules, better tools for parents, and stronger accountability for platforms and social media apps."
