The European Commission's Special Panel on child safety online delivered its final recommendations on July 13, proposing a phased framework that would bar screens entirely for children under 3, permit only supervised internet use for those under 13, and impose limits on older teenagers The Verge. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the executive body could bring forward legislation within months.

"This is not about whether children can access social media. It is about when social media can access our children," von der Leyen said, framing the Commission's position ahead of a formal proposal The Verge.

The panel's report also recommends that platforms be required to demonstrate their services are safe before younger users are permitted to access them at all — a reversal of the current default, under which platforms operate first and face enforcement action after harm is documented. Von der Leyen said she backs that recommendation The Verge.

Von der Leyen indicated the Commission will digest the panel's findings and return with concrete proposals "after the summer." Reporting from POLITICO and Euractiv, published in the days before the panel's final session, both point to September as the likely window: four EU officials told POLITICO the Commission could unveil EU-wide age restrictions as soon as that month POLITICO, while Euractiv reported an exclusive that Brussels is expected to announce proposals for a child-focused social media ban in September Euractiv.

Any resulting legislation would require sign-off from both the European Parliament and the 27 member states before taking effect — a co-decision process that has historically stretched EU tech rules, from GDPR to the Digital Services Act, across multi-year negotiation cycles The Verge.

The political groundwork was laid last November, when the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for an EU-wide ban on social media access for children under 16, backed by a vote of 483 to 92 with 86 abstentions Reuters. The resolution pushed for a harmonised EU digital minimum age of 16 for social media platforms Reuters. Under the version of the rules now circulating, minors aged 13 to 16 would be permitted to use social media only with parental consent Reuters, a structure closer to graduated access than an outright cutoff.

Enforcement infrastructure is already partly in place. An EU age verification app was confirmed ready as of April 15, giving regulators a technical mechanism to check user age at the platform level without necessarily requiring full identity disclosure Reuters. How that app integrates with individual national ID systems and platform-side APIs remains an open implementation question that the Commission's forthcoming proposal will need to address.

The Commission's own press office has supplied the behavioral data underpinning the push. According to its press release covering the panel's final meeting, children who began using social media before age 10 report 7.5 hours of daily screen time on weekends, compared with 5.7 hours among those who started later European Commission. That gap — nearly two hours — is being cited by officials as evidence that earlier onset correlates with heavier, more habitual use patterns later in adolescence, though the release does not establish causation.

Regulatory pressure on individual platforms has been building in parallel with the policy debate. A preliminary EU investigation found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act over the design of Facebook and Instagram, which regulators characterized as addictive. TikTok received a similar preliminary DSA finding earlier in 2025 over comparable design features The Verge. Neither finding is final, but both point toward the same regulatory theory the expert panel is now formalizing at the policy level: that recommendation engines, infinite scroll, and engagement-optimized notification systems constitute a design problem, not merely a content-moderation one.

That distinction matters for how any eventual law would be drafted. A content-based restriction is comparatively straightforward to legislate and to litigate; a design-based restriction requires regulators to define, and platforms to prove, what "safe by design" means at the level of recommendation algorithms and UX patterns — a much harder technical and legal bar to clear, and one that will likely dominate the negotiation once a formal text reaches Parliament and the Council.

Worth flagging: the safe-by-design requirement, if enacted as the panel envisions, would functionally require platforms to run compliance testing on ranking and engagement systems before onboarding users below a set age threshold, which is a materially different compliance burden than age-gating alone. Age verification technology has existed in various forms for years; verifying that a recommendation system does not exploit a developing brain's reward pathways is a much less settled discipline, and one where the EU would be legislating ahead of established technical consensus.

The Commission's timeline puts a formal proposal roughly two months out from the panel's July 13 findings. Given the scale of the co-decision process ahead, any binding EU-wide rule is unlikely to take effect before 2027 at the earliest, even on an accelerated legislative track.