Before Restricting Children's Social Media by Age — How to Establish Age Is Still Sitting in the Open-Questions Column

Who carries the duty

Mobile carriersStatutory duty

Required to establish age at contract and to offer filtering

Social media, video, app stores, games, live streamingBest-efforts duty (Articles 21–23)

The paper states that the division of roles with mobile carriers needs rebalancing

How age is to be established

• Self-declared date of birthWidely used today
• Age data supplied by mobile carriersUnder consideration
• Age estimation by AIUnder consideration

The same paper also asks how far protection should extend when someone slips past the age check by giving a different age. Evasion is taken as given, and the question is what to do beyond it. A rule that draws a line at an age demands, before the line is drawn, a means of telling which side someone is on.

Should the age at which children may use social media be set in law? The debate continues. Look at how any such rule would be operated, though, and the ground in front of it is empty.

A paper issued on 30 April 2026 by Japan's Children and Families Agency puts it this way: as regards requiring various methods of age verification from specified server administrators, including platform operators such as social media services above a certain scale, how should the merits and the legal basis be considered, while assessing feasibility and examples from other countries? Three bodies are named as responsible: the Children and Families Agency, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Two methods are named. Age data supplied by mobile carriers, and age estimation by AI. Both appear in the form of a question about whether to require them. This is not the stage of working out how to operate a settled mechanism; it is the stage of considering which mechanisms are candidates.

The same paper contains a more pointed line.

How should requiring age verification as a protective measure be considered? If age verification is to be required, what methods could reasonably exist? And how far should protection be required where someone slips past the age check by giving a different age?

Evasion is placed in the premises.

Why does it come out this way? Look at where the duties sit.

The current law is built to impose duties on mobile carriers. At the point of contract the carrier establishes the user's age and provides filtering and similar measures. The duty was placed where an occasion to establish age reliably occurs: signing up for a line. As a design from before smartphones spread, it is coherent.

Platform operators, on the other hand, including social media, video sharing, app stores, games and live streaming, are specified server administrators carrying only the best-efforts duties of Articles 21 to 23. The same paper states that a rebalancing is needed in the division of roles among stakeholders, between the mobile carriers on whom duties are currently imposed and the others.

The services children actually touch and the businesses carrying the duty have come apart. A parent signs the line contract; a child installs the app and uses it. Age established on the network side is not passed to the app side. Hence "age data supplied by mobile carriers" appearing as something to consider. The issue is that information already held has no route to where it is needed.

Nor is the boundary settled. Noting that the current category of specified server administrators can take in search sites, e-commerce sites and much else, the paper asks which services should be covered if duties are imposed on some of them, and whether the definition should draw on business content and scale rather than service type alone. Non-commercial operators currently fall inside it too. Until it is settled who carries the duty, there is no settled party of whom age verification would be required.

A rule that draws a line at an age needs, before the line is drawn, a means of telling which side someone is on. Obvious as that sounds, the order of debate is often reversed. What the age should be is argued first, and how to establish it is left behind as an open question.

The age check in wide use today is entering your own date of birth at registration. That does not establish age; it receives a declaration. Put in terms of information asymmetry, the operator does not know the user's age. Not knowing, it is being asked to build a rule that assumes it does.

From here the options split three ways.

The first is to raise the accuracy of the check: pass over contract data held by mobile carriers, match against official identity documents, estimate from face or behaviour using AI. Accuracy rises, and with it the volume of identity data flowing to platforms. To protect children, children's identifying information is handed to operators. The party protected and the party handed the data remain the same.

The second is to assume evasion and thicken the protection that applies beyond it. That is what the paper is reaching for when it asks how far protection should extend where someone gives a different age. Mechanisms that stop dangerous contact or charges regardless of age. No line is drawn, and the implementation burden on operators rises accordingly.

The third is to stop drawing lines and move resources toward teaching how to use these services. This takes time to show results, and does not arrive in time for children being harmed now.

In practice it will be a combination. What matters is that if the debate proceeds as though only the first has been chosen, the age gets fixed while the means of establishing it is never built. Needing to count separately what has been provided and what has arrived is the same structure taken up in policy exclusion and non-take-up（このサイトの記事）. Designing for the education route means distributing the capacity to judge, in the manner of reading official statistics in practice（このサイトの記事）.

Before deciding whether to draw the line, who bears the cost of building the means to see it? That, in substance, is what the paper is asking.

Further Reading

• データリテラシー入門 : 日本の課題を読み解くスキル (Introduction to Data Literacy: Skills for Reading Japan's Problems)（外部サイト、新しいタブで開きます） (Akinori Tomohara, Iwanami Shoten). An introduction to what a reader should check in order not to misjudge the numbers and claims they receive. It gives a sense of what the third route, moving resources toward teaching use, would actually contain.

References

Matters for Consideration Concerning the Act on an Internet Environment for Young People (Material 3) — Children and Families Agency (2026). Working Group on the Act on an Internet Environment for Young People

Matters for Consideration Concerning the Act on an Internet Environment for Young People (Material 1) — Children and Families Agency (2026). Working Group on the Act on an Internet Environment for Young People

Act on Development of an Environment that Provides Safe and Secure Internet Use for Young People — Children and Families Agency (2026). Children and Families Agency

Status of Measures for the Protection of Young People — Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (2026). Youth Protection Working Group, Study Group on Issues in Information Distribution in Digital Space