The European Union wants to regulate access to social media, video sharing platforms, online video games and even AI chatbots for children and adolescents. And it wants to do so with the EU Kids Act, a provision made official today 17 September by the European Commission with which Brussels aims to make digital services safer for minors and to introduce a system of access to these technologies based on the age of the users.
The proposal includes a ban on access to social media for children under 13 and restrictions for children between 13 and 15 years old. The latter could use so-called “mini accounts”, opened with the consent and under the control of parents, with limited functionality and limits on usage time. From the age of 15 onwards it would be possible to create an account independently, but the platforms should still guarantee an ad hoc experience for minors. The text is still in an initial phase: it will still have to be examined and negotiated with the Member States and the European Parliament and only after this legislative process can the new rules become definitive and binding – a lot could therefore still change.
The EU proposal on minors under 13 and children: the EU Kids Act
Warning: the system would not only concern Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube. The proposal also takes into consideration AI chatbots, therefore all services that allow dialogue with artificial intelligence, as well as online video games.
Based on the draft EU Kids Act, previewed by Reutersfor younger children the limitations would be even stricter. Under 3 years of age there would be no access to services considered high risk; between 3 and 12 years of age, use would be possible through services designed for children and under the control of parents. From ages 13 to 14, introductory accounts with parental supervision would come into play, while from ages 15 and up kids could have personal accounts.
However, an important part of the proposal concerns what companies will have to do within their platforms. Brussels wants to introduce the principle of “safety by design”. What does this mean in simple terms? That when designing any online service also intended for minors, companies will have to take user safety into account from the early planning stages, instead of intervening only after a certain problem has occurred.
This means that platforms should avoid features considered capable of encouraging their compulsive use, such as infinite scrolling, which allows you to continue scrolling content without a precise end, insistent notifications and some dopaminergic reward systems that would create addictions, especially in younger people. Even the algorithms that decide which content to show should be designed to avoid dragging young users towards increasingly extreme sequences of content, the so-called “rabbit holes”.
There would also be more effective parental control tools, automatically active security settings and systems that prevent strangers from easily contacting minors’ accounts. Kids should also be able to report harmful content more easily.
Another central point concerns age verification. Social media and various platforms should verify the age of users when a new account is created. Online gaming services would also be required to carry out checks before downloading video games. The objective is to prevent the personal data limit from remaining merely a piece of data entered independently by the user.
Previous bans on social media: from Spain to Australia
Brussels, however, is not starting from scratch. In Australia, from 10 December 2025, major social media platforms must take reasonable steps to prevent anyone under 16 from having an account. Among the affected services are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit and X.
And to be honest, even in Europe there are countries that have already moved independently to ban platforms for teenagers. Spain and Portugal, for example, have introduced measures to limit access to social media to younger users, and France had also planned to block social media for those under 15, which was later annulled by the country’s highest court because it was deemed to be in conflict with fundamental freedoms (for the record, however, President Emmanuel Macron has announced his intention to revise it).
The European proposal therefore arrives at a very particular historical moment, where several governments are already trying to establish what the relationship should be between minors and large digital platforms. Obviously, if the EU Kids Act were to complete its legislative process, the rules would be applied in a coordinated way in all 27 countries of the Union.
