YouTube CEO Neil Mohan speaks during a panel discussion at the Democracy Summit in Washington, DC on March 30, 2023.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
YouTube CEO Neil Mohan is the latest in a string of technology company leaders to admit to restricting children’s use of social media as the harms of being online for young people become more apparent.
Mohan, who took the helm of YouTube’s executive team in 2023, was just named Time Magazine’s 2025 CEO of the Year. He told the magazine in an interview that children’s use of media platforms is controlled and restricted.
“We limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. We tend to be stricter on weekdays and less strict on weekends. We’re not perfect by any measure,” Mohan said in a TikTok video posted by Time magazine on Thursday.
He emphasized that “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that this also applies to other online services and platforms. Mohan has three children, two sons and a daughter.
Experts continue to sound the alarm about how excessive use of smartphones and social media is negatively impacting children and teens. Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University and author of The Anxious Generation, argues that children shouldn’t have smartphones until they’re 14 and shouldn’t have access to social media until they’re 16.
“Let’s give our kids flip phones, but remember that smartphones aren’t really phones. They can make calls, but they’re multipurpose devices that the world can use to reach them,” Hite said in an interview with CNBC’s Tania Breyer earlier this year.
This week, Australia became the first country to formally ban users under 16 from accessing major social media platforms. Prior to the bill’s passage last year, a YouGov poll found 77% of Australians supported a social media ban for under-16s. Still, this development has faced some resistance since the law was enacted.
In a broader interview with Time on Wednesday, Mohan said he felt he had the “ultimate responsibility” to young people and giving parents more control over how their children use the platform. YouTube Kids was launched in 2015 as a children’s version of the Google-owned platform.
He said his goal is to make it “easy for every parent” to manage their child’s YouTube usage “in a way that makes sense for their family,” especially since each parent’s approach is different.
Bill Gates, Mark Cuban
Heads at several technology companies are taking a similar approach. Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki also banned children from viewing videos on the app unless they were using YouTube Kids. She also limited the time she spent on the platform.
Wojcicki told CNBC in 2019, “I allow my younger children to use YouTube Kids, but I limit their time on it.” “I don’t think it’s good to do too much of anything.”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is among the tech giants speaking out against allowing too much screen time to young people. Gates has publicly said that he will not give his three children, now adults, cell phones until they are teenagers.
“There were no cell phones on the table during meals,” Gates said a few years ago. “I didn’t let my kids have cell phones until they were 14, but they complained that other kids got cell phones much earlier.”
Meanwhile, billionaire Mark Cuban has deployed Cisco routers and used management software to monitor what apps his children are using and even block them from using their phones.
