Australia has proposed banning underage users from creating social media accounts. But other, less restrictive options may be a better first choice.

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Jonathan Bellack is the author of Platformocracy, a free weekly newsletter that advocates for democratic governance of online platforms. He is in his fourth decade as an Internet professional, including 15 years as a senior product leader in ads and online safety at Google, and was the founding director of the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Jonathan has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from the New York University Stern School of Business.

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