These countries are limiting kids’ social media use: Who is banning what

This is a slow-burn regulatory overhang, not an immediate revenue shock, but it meaningfully raises the probability of product redesign across consumer internet. The first-order risk is moderation of under-18 engagement, yet the second-order impact is more important: once age-gating becomes standard, platforms lose the ability to rely on frictionless onboarding and algorithmic re-engagement loops, which should reduce session frequency and ad inventory quality over time. That shifts pricing power toward platforms with stronger authenticated identity, first-party data, and parental-control ecosystems.

GOOGL looks relatively insulated versus peers because YouTube already sits closer to a logged-in, age-verifiable environment and has more room to absorb compliance costs through product architecture rather than pure traffic loss. The bigger risk is margin drag from age assurance, content filtering, and higher legal/compliance overhead across jurisdictions, but those are manageable versus the potential engagement hit to more purely social-native apps. For RBLX, the issue is more acute: any tightening around minor access, parental linkage, or feature throttling directly attacks the core growth engine, since its monetization depends on repeated, high-frequency usage by younger cohorts.

The market may be underestimating how fragmented enforcement will be. That reduces the odds of a clean global demand collapse, but it also creates a patchwork compliance burden that favors scaled incumbents and penalizes smaller platforms and user-generated-content venues that cannot amortize verification costs. Over 6-18 months, the most likely outcome is not a sudden ban-driven revenue cliff, but a gradual compression in engagement growth and a re-rating of companies whose TAM assumptions depend on teen-heavy cohorts.