A child who wants to open their own social media account will have to wait until their 15th birthday—this is the most concrete, and most memorable, line in the European Commission's latest proposal. The EU Kids Act, put forward by the European Commission, represents the largest attempt yet to impose age restrictions on social media: banned for under-13s, allowed under parental supervision for 13- and 14-year-olds, and only self-registerable starting at age 15.
"Today we have ample evidence of the harm social media causes to developing brains and personalities, and parents see the effects all too clearly," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. "Let's be clear, setting age limits doesn't mean letting tech companies off the hook for what's on their platforms. These platforms have been gambling with children's mental health, and now we're flipping the burden of proof."
The proposal is structured in three tiers, each with specific restrictions rather than vague pledges. Children under 13, while barred from regular social media, would be able to use "specially designed child-friendly video-sharing services" through guardian-managed "mini accounts," capped at one hour of daily screen time, with adults able to easily control what content the child sees. For 13- and 14-year-olds, parents would set up sub-accounts allowing supervised use of "age-appropriate social and video platforms," also subject to social contact restrictions and the same one-hour daily screen time cap.
Not Just Age Gates—Tearing Down Addictive Design Too
What makes this proposal more noteworthy than a simple age restriction is that it goes directly after platform design itself. The European Commission's documents state that recommendation algorithms drag minors "down a rabbit hole of harmful content," and the proposal therefore calls for banning such algorithms, while also blocking infinite scroll, nighttime push notifications, and unsolicited contact from strangers. AI chatbots would also have to be turned off by default and could not be designed to foster emotional dependency in users.
Age verification is another key piece of the puzzle, but one that has already proven difficult to get right elsewhere—Australia's experience being a case in point. The EU's approach requires platforms to conduct age checks when users open new accounts, and to estimate the age of existing users using "reasonable alternative methods" such as credit card information, while adopting age verification tools that don't retain identity documents or biometric data, such as the EU's newly launched age verification app.
Enforcement would follow the existing framework under the Digital Services Act (DSA), with penalties for violations capped at 6% of a company's global annual revenue, along with a fast-track 90-day enforcement procedure. The European Commission has not specified a fine amount in this proposal. "Given the clear need for urgent and comprehensive action at the Union level, this legislation must be passed as quickly as possible," the Commission wrote in the document.
Whether the law can actually be implemented, however, remains uncertain. France's top court previously blocked a similar domestic proposal on grounds that it violated freedom of expression. With the EU's population of roughly 450 million, the EU Kids Act, if enacted, would have a broader reach than any social media age-restriction law to date, and its targeting of addictive mechanisms like recommendation algorithms is also rare among similar legislation. Tech platforms including Meta have yet to comment on the proposal. Criticism so far has focused mainly on the technical difficulty of age verification and concerns about overlap with existing regulations. Bernhard Rohleder, CEO of Germany's digital industry association BITKOM, said: "Age verification remains a technical challenge, and rules running in parallel with existing laws like the Digital Services Act are both problematic and unnecessary."
