Algorithms, Manipulation and AI: Childhood Is Entering Riskier Territory

The United Nations is warning that children and young people are increasingly exposed to disinformation, harassment, manipulative design, commercial surveillance and emerging AI risks. As artificial intelligence spreads faster than regulation, the debate is shifting from simply protecting young users online to deciding whether children’s rights will be built into the digital systems shaping their lives.

Children and young people are increasingly navigating a digital environment that is evolving faster than the rules designed to protect them, prompting the United Nations to warn that the rapid spread of artificial intelligence could deepen existing online risks unless governments and technology companies act quickly.

In a new brief, the UN highlights a growing range of threats facing young users, including disinformation, harassment, algorithmic bias, manipulative design, commercial surveillance and the malicious use of AI. Its warning goes beyond harmful content appearing on a screen. The deeper concern is that some of these risks are embedded in the architecture and business models of digital platforms themselves.

Systems designed to maximise engagement, collect personal data and encourage spending can work directly against the interests of children whose identities, habits and relationships are still developing. AI is adding another layer of urgency as automated systems become increasingly integrated into social media, information environments and other areas of digital life before governments have settled fundamental questions about safety and accountability.

The UN Says Online Harms Are Not Simply Accidents

For years, discussions about children's internet safety have centred on problems such as inappropriate content, cyberbullying, misinformation and exploitation. The UN's latest intervention widens that lens by focusing on how digital platforms themselves are designed. The brief argues that many harms affecting young people are not accidental consequences of internet use. They can arise from business models built around monetising attention and personal data, as well as design choices intended to maximise engagement and spending.

Algorithms can influence what young people see and how long they remain engaged, while features such as "dark patterns" can steer users toward particular actions. The UN also points to loot boxes and other mechanisms that can encourage compulsive behaviour or spending.

For children, these practices carry particular significance because they operate during formative years. The UN warns that such systems can normalise commercial surveillance and manipulative digital design at a stage when young people's identities and habits are still developing. AI could intensify those concerns. The technology is spreading rapidly while policy responses remain comparatively slow, creating new challenges ranging from AI-generated content to AI-facilitated exploitation.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has made child safety a prominent part of the organisation's wider AI governance push. At the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in July, he called for an AI Child Safety Pledge and warned against treating children as experimental subjects for poorly regulated technologies. His message captured the central problem confronting regulators: technological deployment is moving ahead of the safeguards intended to govern its consequences.

The Attention Economy Is Becoming a Child-Rights Battleground

Online platforms can benefit from keeping people engaged for longer periods, gathering increasingly detailed information about their behaviour and encouraging spending. Advertising systems can become more effective as profiling becomes more sophisticated, while recommendation technologies can continually adjust what users see in order to sustain interaction.

For children, this raises questions that extend beyond conventional privacy concerns. The UN is effectively asking whether business models built around attention, behavioural data and persuasive design can operate without stronger restrictions when their users include children and adolescents.

Advertising illustrates the difficulty. Digital commercial messages are not always clearly separated from entertainment or information. Advertising can be embedded within online content and increasingly difficult for young users to recognise. The UN specifically warns about hidden advertising techniques that can be used to increase children's online spending.

If stronger protections require companies to reduce profiling, change recommendation systems, restrict manipulative features or redesign advertising practices, child safety may come into tension with some of the mechanisms that support engagement and revenue. This is why the debate is unlikely to be resolved through parental controls alone. Effective protection could require changes in how platforms are designed, how children's data is handled and how commercial incentives operate around young audiences.

Governments, technology companies and advertisers therefore face a more difficult question than whether harmful content should be removed. They must decide which digital practices should be considered acceptable in the first place when children are involved.

The UN Warns Against Treating Young People Only as Victims

Protection, however, is only one side of the issue. The UN stresses that children and young people should not be viewed solely as passive victims of the digital information crisis. They are also creators, journalists, organisers and participants in civic life, often using online platforms to build communities and shape public debate.

The same digital spaces that allow youth movements to organise and amplify their voices can also expose participants to harassment and surveillance. Young women, minorities and activists can face particularly serious risks when their public engagement makes them more visible online.

Overly restrictive responses could therefore create new problems. Rules designed to protect children could also affect their privacy, expression, access to information or ability to participate in public life if they are poorly constructed. That is one reason the UN argues that young people's perspectives should be incorporated into the research and policymaking used to address information-integrity problems.

Charlotte Scaddan, the UN's Senior Adviser on Information Integrity, has framed protection and participation as complementary rather than competing goals.

Adults designing digital regulation may understand legal frameworks, business models and technological systems, but young people possess direct experience of how these platforms are actually used. Excluding them from policymaking risks producing rules that fail to recognise emerging behaviours or overlook the harms users themselves consider most serious.

The challenge is therefore not simply to shield young people from technology. It is to create an environment where they can participate, learn, organise and communicate without being subjected to avoidable manipulation, exploitation or surveillance.

The UN Says the Window for Writing Child Rights Into AI Rules Is Closing

Governments and advocates are already debating addictive design features, behavioural advertising, privacy and content moderation. But artificial intelligence is expanding while many of those earlier disputes remain unresolved. The UN warns that the window for embedding children's rights into emerging AI governance frameworks is narrowing.

Technologies become more difficult to reshape once they are deeply integrated into everyday life. Companies build products around established systems, commercial models become dependent on particular forms of data and engagement, and users become accustomed to existing digital behaviour. AI governance therefore represents an opportunity to establish safeguards before those patterns become entrenched.

The UN is calling for action across several fronts. Member States are being encouraged to develop appropriate laws, technology companies to strengthen child safety, advertisers to prioritise children's rights, news organisations to better serve young audiences and researchers to address gaps in knowledge, including those concerning the Global South.

The organisation is also pursuing wider international AI governance efforts through initiatives including the Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI.

What matters next is whether those principles produce practical changes.

Governments will need to decide what obligations companies should face when AI systems are used by or affect children. Technology firms will face scrutiny over product design, accountability and safeguards. Advertisers will have to confront questions around targeting and commercial influence, while researchers will need to establish a clearer picture of how different forms of digital harm affect young people across societies.

The stakes extend far beyond the current generation of platforms. Today's children may be among the first to grow up with AI-mediated information and communication as an ordinary feature of everyday life. The regulatory decisions being made now could therefore determine what kinds of automated influence, surveillance and commercial persuasion society eventually accepts as normal.