For today's children, the internet is no longer simply a place to access information or communicate with friends. It has become central to education, health care, entertainment, civic participation, and social development. Across Latin America, expanding digital connectivity has created enormous opportunities for economic growth and social inclusion, allowing millions of young people to participate more fully in the digital economy.

Yet as children's lives become increasingly connected, so do the risks they face online. Grooming, child sexual exploitation and abuse, cyberbullying, harmful content, privacy violations, algorithmically amplified harms, and the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) are growing in both scale and complexity. These threats are evolving faster than many governments' legal and institutional frameworks, making child online protection one of the defining digital governance challenges facing Latin America today.

Digi Americas Alliance's latest report, Child Online Protection in Latin America: Risks, Frameworks, and Policy Responses examines national approaches across six Latin American countries, highlights leading international frameworks, and offers practical recommendations to strengthen regional cooperation while respecting national differences.

Child Online Protection Is Now a Cybersecurity Challenge

Child online protection should not be viewed solely as a child welfare issue. It has become a core component of digital governance, cybersecurity, privacy, telecommunications policy, and digital rights. Protecting children online requires more than content moderation. It demands secure digital infrastructure, responsible platform governance, effective cybersecurity practices, and coordinated public policy.

Cybersecurity plays a particularly important role. Vulnerabilities in platforms, devices, and networks can enable grooming, identity theft, unauthorized access to children's personal information, and other forms of online exploitation. At the same time, AI is reshaping both the threat landscape and the tools available to defend against it. While AI can improve threat detection and content moderation, it can also be exploited by malicious actors to automate scams, generate harmful content, and manipulate children through increasingly sophisticated techniques. As governments develop child online protection policies, cybersecurity must be recognized as a foundational element of creating safer digital environments.

Progress Across Latin America

Latin America is not starting from scratch. Over the past decade, governments across the region have strengthened data protection laws, developed national cybersecurity strategies, established reporting mechanisms, expanded digital literacy initiatives, and introduced policies designed to protect children online.

However, the report finds that implementation remains uneven. Significant differences in legal definitions, platform obligations, institutional responsibilities, enforcement capacity, and technical standards create uncertainty for governments and industry alike, while making it more difficult to address online harms that routinely cross national borders.

Harmonization Over Regional Fragmentation

The international nature of online threats makes regional cooperation essential. Platforms operating across Latin America must navigate multiple legal frameworks and reporting requirements, while law enforcement agencies often face slow and inconsistent cross-border cooperation. Families and educators are frequently left to manage risks that require sophisticated legal, technical, and institutional responses.

Rather than pursuing identical laws, the report argues that Latin America should focus on harmonization. Legal systems, institutional capacities, and policy priorities vary significantly across the region, making a one-size-fits-all regulatory model unrealistic. Instead, governments should work toward interoperable legal principles and shared technical standards while preserving the flexibility to tailor implementation to domestic needs.

Among its recommendations, the report calls for harmonized legal definitions, privacy-preserving age assurance technologies, stronger cross-border information sharing, improved regional reporting and evidence exchange, greater cybersecurity capacity building, and expanded public-private collaboration. These recommendations build upon internationally recognized frameworks developed by organizations including UNICEF, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the WeProtect Global Alliance.

Public-private collaboration is central to this effort. Governments cannot address these challenges alone, nor can industry or civil society independently solve them. Telecommunications providers, technology companies, educators, child protection organizations, parents, and policymakers all have important roles to play in creating safer digital environments.

Informing Policy in Brazil

The report's recommendations have already begun informing policy discussions throughout the region. Shortly after its publication, Digi Americas Executive Director Belisario Contreras was invited to testify before the Brazilian Senate regarding both the report's findings and Brazil's broader cybersecurity legislation.

His testimony emphasized that protecting children online should never come at the expense of privacy, freedom of expression, or meaningful access to digital technologies. Instead, effective policy should combine safety- and privacy-by-design, risk-based regulation, strong public-private collaboration, cross-border cooperation, and ongoing digital literacy. He also encouraged policymakers to establish clear governance structures, recognize shared responsibility models for digital services, and promote legal certainty through practical, proportionate implementation.

Brazil's leadership illustrates an important point: child online protection is no longer a niche policy issue. It is becoming an essential component of national cybersecurity strategies, digital governance frameworks, and broader efforts to build resilient digital economies.

Looking Ahead

Protecting children online is not a one-time legislative exercise but an ongoing governance commitment. As technologies continue to evolve, governments, industry, academia, and civil society must continue adapting their approaches while learning from one another's experiences.

By combining cybersecurity, sound digital governance, privacy protections, public-private collaboration, and regional cooperation, Latin America has an opportunity to build a practical, interoperable, and rights-respecting approach that protects children from harm while ensuring they can continue to benefit from the educational, economic, and social opportunities of the digital age.

Read the Report:

• English
• Español
• Português

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