Movement to get kids off social media gains momentum in EU

The snowball is officially rolling. In the wake of Australia’s landmark Social Media Minimum Age act, the movement to get Europe’s children off social media has picked up momentum, as individual nations and EU leadership consider how, exactly, to do it.

Some are closer to an answer than others. France is on the cusp of passing a law. Spain, Greece, the Netherlands and Denmark have joined it in a “coalition of the willing” on age assurance laws for major social platforms. The UK is exploring the idea; so, too, is Ireland. According to DW, Italy has introduced a bill in parliament to impose social media restrictions, including on child influencers. Portugal has submitted legislation requiring parental consent for children under 16 to access social media. Austria is “contemplating” a prohibition on social media for kids.

It is becoming clear that regulators are recognizing the true scale of their mission – and understanding that a collective approach will be necessary to success. A report in the Financial Times quotes Clara Chappaz, the French ambassador for digital affairs, who says “the best way to be effective is for countries to do this together. It’s like cigarettes, eventually there was a tipping point.”

The direct comparison to cigarettes underscores why social media companies are alarmed, and vocally opposed to age checks. While cigarettes have not gone away, the product has been fighting pariah status for decades, and the proliferation of public health laws, warning labels and anti-smoking campaigns has drastically reduced the number of young people taking up the habit.

Fewer young smokers, of course, means fewer adult smokers. The same dynamic is at play with social media, which thrives on the insecurities and fraught social dynamics of teenhood to make kids dependent. If widespread age assurance laws sever the connection for young users, many will find alternative ways to manage their social lives, and become less likely to join social networks as they get older. After all, who wants to be a part of a lame, hazardous network their parents spend so much time staring at?

Father of 106 children dismisses online risks for kids

The implications are what’s fueling the vitriol and threats coming from tech billionaires. After Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced his government’s intention to pursue age restrictions for social media, Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and turned it into X, wrote on his platform that “Dirty Sánchez is a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain.”

Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of messaging app Telegram, leaned into the notion that age checks could turn Spain into “a surveillance state under the guise of protection”.

“This isn’t just about kids – it requires platforms to use strict checks, like IDs or biometrics,” says Durov, who has reportedly sired 106 children and was indicted in France for charges including complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material.

The billionaire suggests age checks could open the door to mass data collection – an example of the erroneous yet widespread conflation of age assurance and identity checks. Online age assurance vendors have been at pains to highlight that their product is fundamentally binary: the yes or no answer to the question “is this person old enough to enter this site.” The potential for harmful data breaches is low if the information attached to a given individual is merely “yes” or “no.” (Compare that with, say, Telegram, which in May 2024 suffered a data breach that exposed 361.5 million email addresses, usernames and passwords.)

Besides which, the argument is also an attempt to frame others as a threat for doing exactly what major social media platforms have been doing for years. Data collection is the name of the game for sites like Instagram and Facebook – the bedrock of their business model. If tech billionaires were actually concerned about the risks of mass surveillance, they might look into the new Ring doorbell feature that turns the company’s network of cameras into something like Batman’s invasive sonar system from The Dark Knight.

TikTok could face fines under EU Digital Services Act

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that many of these platforms were designed to be bad for us from the beginning.

A release from the European Commission says it has “preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act for its addictive design,” which includes features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and a personalised recommender system.

An investigation “preliminarily indicates that TikTok did not adequately assess how these addictive features could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of its users, including minors and vulnerable adults.”

“TikTok seems to fail to implement reasonable, proportionate and effective measures to mitigate risks stemming from its addictive design. At this stage, the Commission considers that TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service. For instance, by disabling key addictive features such as ‘infinite scroll’ over time, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks’, including during the night, and adapting its recommender system.”

TikTok now has the opportunity to respond to the Commission’s findings.

VPNs increasingly seen as loophole in age legislation

While Australia has announced that its law resulted in the removal of 4.7 million social media accounts believed to belong to underage users, there continues to be hand-wringing over the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) as a way to skirt age checks – and talk of how to address the problem with legislation.

A release from the European Commission says there has been a “significant surge” in the number VPNs being downloaded and used as a workaround for online age verification methods, and notes that some in the UK have already called for VPNs to be restricted to use by adults. But it also notes the complexity of the issue.

“While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risks to anonymity and data protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings.”

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometrics  |  children  |  digital ID  |  Digital Services Act  |  EU age verification  |  Europe  |  regulation  |  social media  |  VPN (virtual private network)