An Auditable Global Research Agenda for Social-Media and Generative-AI Restrictions Affecting Youth

Governments and schools are rapidly restricting phones, social-media accounts, and generative-AI tools for young people, and rules for AI companions are now emerging at the model, feature, and account level. Yet the word "ban" collapses interventions that act on different objects, settings, ages, and mechanisms. This makes policies across the global landscape difficult to compare and encourages a basic inferential error: conflating announced rules with delivered treatments. In this position paper, we review a subset of related work published through August 2026. Several recent studies report that some restrictions reduce the targeted access or use, which, in some cases, has translated to positive downstream effects on learning, well-being, discipline, and safety. In other cases, these downstream reports are mixed, time-varying, or not yet identifiable. To evaluate the effectiveness of age-based technology-restriction policies, we propose TRACE, a minimum evaluation standard covering Treatment, Reach, Adaptation, Consequences, and Equity, ethics, and exit, with auditable youth participation. An initial global registry and research question bank illustrate how TRACE can support prospective, comparable, and child-centered policy evaluation.