Europe Is Proposing New Rules to Keep Young Kids Off Social Media

The European Commission — the main executive body of the European Union — is moving toward strict new rules about when children can use social media. On July 13, a special panel delivered its final recommendations: no screens at all for children under 3, only supervised internet use for those under 13, and limits on teenagers The Verge.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen framed the proposal plainly: "This is not about whether children can access social media. It is about when social media can access our children" The Verge.

How the Rules Would Work

Under the proposals circulating now, children aged 13 to 16 could use social media only if their parents give permission. Younger children would not be allowed at all Reuters.

The panel also wants to flip how regulation works. Right now, social media platforms operate freely and face penalties only after harm shows up. The proposal would require platforms to prove their services are safe before letting young users on in the first place The Verge. Von der Leyen backs this approach.

When This Might Happen

The Commission is expected to unveil formal proposals in September, according to EU officials who spoke with POLITICO POLITICO. But getting to an actual law takes years. Both the European Parliament and all 27 member states must approve any changes. Europe's last two big tech laws — GDPR and the Digital Services Act — each took multiple years to negotiate and implement The Verge. A binding EU-wide rule is unlikely before 2027 at the earliest.

The Real Challenge: Designing Safe Platforms

Here is where the work gets genuinely difficult. Banning children from platforms based on age is straightforward. But the panel's recommendations go further: platforms must redesign how they work — specifically, how their algorithms decide what content to show to younger users.

Social media companies use ranking systems to keep people engaged — the same technology that decides which posts appear first in your feed, which videos autoplay next, and which notifications you receive. These systems are built to be compelling. The concern is that young people's brains may be more vulnerable to this kind of design. The EU's preliminary investigations found that Meta's Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok, use features that regulators called addictive The Verge.

The supporting data show a real pattern. According to the Commission, children who started using social media before age 10 spend an average of 7.5 hours on screens on weekends, compared with 5.7 hours for those who started later European Commission. That is nearly two hours more per day.

From a regulatory standpoint, requiring platforms to prove their ranking systems are not exploitative is far harder than age-gating alone. There is no established industry standard yet for what makes a recommendation system "safe" for a young user's developing brain. The EU would be setting that standard, and platforms would have to test and verify their algorithms meet it. This will likely be the sticking point in any negotiations ahead.

What This Means

The groundwork for this policy has been building for a while. Last November, the European Parliament voted 483 to 92 to push for an EU-wide minimum age of 16 for social media access Reuters.

An EU age-verification app is already built and ready as of April, giving regulators a technical way to check a user's age without necessarily demanding full identity information Reuters. How this tool will work with each country's ID systems and with the platforms themselves still needs to be worked out.

What is clear is that Europe is serious. Whether any rule can actually force platforms to redesign their core business models — engagement and data collection — is a different question, and one that will likely dominate the political negotiations over the coming years.