The Security Imaginary and the Child: How Youth Became the Alibi for Platform Surveillance

• In Event: Algorithmic Governance: Law, Inequality, and the Rise of AI

Abstract

This article examines the construction of the child as a regulatory figure in U.S. platform governance, arguing that the minor invoked across twenty-five years of legislation — from COPPA (1998) through the Kids Online Safety Act (2024) — is not an empirically derived subject but a sociotechnical imaginary whose primary function is political authorization. The KOSA passed the U.S. Senate 91–3 in 2024 despite a substantial and contested research literature finding no reliable causal link between social media use and youth mental health harm; we read this outcome not as a failure of evidence to reach legislators but as evidence that the child figure operates independently of empirical verification. Drawing on Jasanoff and Kim's concept of the sociotechnical imaginary, moral panic theory, and the intersection of critical childhood studies with surveillance scholarship, we argue that this figure achieves what a rights-based privacy framework cannot: bipartisan consensus, by recasting population-scale monitoring as protective care and deferring comprehensive privacy legislation indefinitely. Legislative discourse analysis of 5,000+ pages of congressional records across five regulatory moments traces how the child figure anchors surveillance mechanisms that consistently exceed their stated justifications, and how each successive wave of child safety legislation deposits institutional infrastructure available to the next. The findings contribute to critical platform studies and the sociology of technology regulation by specifying the mechanisms through which protective imaginaries sustain themselves against contrary evidence and foreclose alternative governance arrangements.

Author

• Emerson Victoria Johnston, Stanford University