EU kicks off panel discussions on social media age restrictions

The European Commission has taken another step towards regulating child safety online, organizing the first panel on age restrictions for social media. In parallel, the bloc is also testing the EU Age Verification app across five member states.

The meeting, held last Thursday, invited experts on mental health and child psychology to discuss risks and benefits of children’s access to social media, gaming, messaging apps and AI. Future panels will invite different stakeholders, including youth representatives, computer science experts and child rights advocates.

The recommendations from the meetings will be presented to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen by the summer. The goal is to forge a “strong, realistic, European approach” to keeping children safe online, according to von der Leyen.

“In Europe, tech platforms already have a responsibility to ensure the safety of users and we will continue to ensure they do so,” she says. “But we must also do more to protect and empower our young people online.”

The EU has been working on protecting children from harmful content through the Digital Service Act (DSA) and other initiatives. Among them is the EU Age Verification app, developed to support the implementation of the DSA and its provisions to protect minors online.

The privacy-preserving app has been developed and is currently being tested in Denmark, Greece, Spain, France and Italy. The platform was created by the T-Scy consortium, composed of Scytales (Sweden) and T-Systems International (Germany) and is fully interoperable with the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallets.

Meanwhile, debates on restricting children’s access to online services are taking place at both the EU and national levels.

In November last year, Members of the European Parliament adopted a non-legislative report that supports an EU-wide digital minimum age of 16 for accessing social media, video-sharing platforms, and AI companions, and the introduction of age assurance systems.

The report notes that the EU currently has a fragmented approach to age assurance and recommends discussing an EU-level solution. Some member states, however, have called for preserving national differences in implementing a digital age of majority.

A markedly faster legislative process has been going on in Australia, where the government has already banned under-16s from social media. On Monday, the country expanded the regulation, introducing age verification regimes for AI chatbots, app stores, online gaming, search engines, certain messaging services and pornography sites.

During her annual speech to the European Parliament last year, Commissioner von der Leyen said she was closely watching Australia’s age verification policy.

Article Topics

age verification  |  Digital Services Act  |  EU age verification  |  Europe  |  social media