Why mandating and enforcing EU regulation is preferable to a social media ban | #childpredator | #kidsaftey | #childsaftey

Should the EU ban young people from accessing social media? Elisabeth Staksrud, Giovanna Mascheroni, Brian O’Neill and Sonia Livingstone argue that rather than restricting children’s access to digital life, the EU should regulate platforms instead.

On 13 July, the co-chairs of the Special Panel on child safety online will recommend to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ways to strengthen the EU’s framework for the protection of minors.

Amid widespread public concerns that social media has harmful effects on children’s development, and facing mounting political pressure from many EU member states to take action, the EC President has indicated she will consider some form of social media delay and perhaps announce a ban.

The independent EU Kids Online research network recently surveyed 29,000 children about their digital lives. As researchers invited to join the Special Panel, this post explains why we believe that age bans may look like decisive action, but they reduce children’s rights to a question of exclusion.

Our single most important recommendation is this: Make the Article 28 Guidelines of the Digital Services Act (DSA) mandatory for digital providers. This offers a better path, requiring digital services to respect children’s full range of rights, from protection, privacy and safety to participation, information, play, education and freedom of expression.

Why? Because Article 28 is the part of the DSA that already requires online platforms and services accessible to and used by children to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors. The Guidelines translate this legal duty into concrete expectations for safer digital services. Making them mandatory would therefore move child online safety from good intentions and voluntary commitments to enforceable obligations.

Don’t ban children, regulate platforms

Across Europe and beyond, governments are looking at age bans as the solution for children’s safety and wellbeing. The logic feels intuitive: if children’s poor mental health is caused by social media, keep them off it.

However, the current debate narrows both the problem and the population: harmful design is not confined to social media, and children and parents are far more diverse in their views, needs, capacities, values and vulnerabilities than age-ban debates suggest.

It also narrows the decision before policymakers: back EU regulation to make digital services safe for children, among many other benefits, or ban children from digital services. The former sounds complex to many, but we need not be afraid of complexity. The latter sounds simple, but will not be so in practice.

Consequently, when asked by the Special Panel’s Co-chairs what we would prioritise in its forthcoming report, we argued: don’t restrict children’s access to digital life, regulate platforms instead. And do so urgently and effectively.

After all, significant European regulatory tools are readily available, notably the GDPR, Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act, AI Act and, coming soon, the Digital Fairness Act. Together, these can and should provide children with considerable safeguards, while not unduly limiting their participation in the digital world. Children definitely want and need much greater safety. But participating is also important – children call for it, they already benefit from it, and it is their right.

Our evidence-based recommendations for the EU

1. Turn the DSA’s Article 28 Guidelines into a binding Code of Conduct for the Protection of Minors. This would be effective, legitimate, consistent with existing law and regulation, and, most importantly, a crucial means of respecting children’s rights in the digital environment.
2. Extend DSA’s Article 28 Guidelines beyond social media to all digital services and environments children actually use, including gaming, messaging and AI chatbots. Continue to adopt a tech-neutral approach since harmful design is not confined to social media alone. Problematically, the Australian approach adopted in its Social Media Minimum Age Act rests on an arbitrary definition of social media, which leaves many platforms and services regularly accessed by children unregulated.
3. Set mandatory minimum standards of safety, privacy and age-appropriateness by design. This means requiring a tech-neutral pre-certification regime, so that any digital service likely to be accessed by children has to demonstrate compliance and genuine benefit to children before it reaches the market.
4. Use the Code to harmonise core standards across member states, grounded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, while respecting national and cultural diversity. Because countries differ in how they define risks and harms to children, the Code must avoid both extremes: a fragmented patchwork that lets platforms shop for the weakest regime, and a one-size-fits-all approach that ignores local contexts.
5. Implementation should be overseen by the European Board for Digital Services (EBDS), supported by rigorous monitoring and public evaluation with transparent benchmarks for compulsory audits and enforceable through standard DSA penalties. The ongoing investigations into Meta and TikTok for age-verification failures and manipulative design suggest this is both possible and necessary.

Why not a ban?

Our recommendation is not a rejection of concern about harm. It comes directly from the evidence on children’s digital lives:

1. Children are not safe online, and the picture is worsening. The latest EU Kids Online survey of 29,000 children across 19 European countries found that fewer than half (48%) feel safe online. Since 2010, children’s exposure to hate speech and other harmful content has increased sharply. Up to one in five 9–16-year-olds report exposure to harmful user-generated content, with misinformation and conspiracy theories now among the most common forms of problematic content encountered. Exposure to self-harm, eating-disorder and drug-related content has also risen sharply since 2011.
2. However, children’s digital lives cannot be reduced to risk alone. Children also use social media and other digital services to communicate with friends and family, watch videos, listen to music, play games, create content, do schoolwork, seek information and access support. Restricting access, especially for under-16s, is therefore most likely to limit communication, participation, learning and support – not just exposure to harm. It may also deepen inequalities, since children from poorer homes may rely more heavily on digital services for information, connection and mental health support.
3. The problem is that risk of harm is not confined to social media. While policy debates often focus on social media platforms, evidence shows that risks are frequently underestimated in other digital environments, including gaming, messaging and GenAI services. These risks are many and complex. They include legal and illegal content, contact, conduct and contract risks, and they fall most heavily on children who are already vulnerable or disadvantaged.
4. Nor do risks of harm disappear under a ban. Harm moves, but it is not eradicated. An age ban on social media is likely to push children towards messaging apps, gaming platforms, GenAI tools or less visible online spaces. Bad actors will follow them there. Pushing children’s digital activities underground may make risks harder for parents, schools, regulators and platforms to see, understand and address.
5. The rise in online risk is systemic. It is rooted in addictive and persuasive design, recommender systems, weak safety-by-design obligations and business models that profit from children’s engagement and attention. A ban that removes children from one category of platform while leaving those business models intact does not address the underlying cause.
6. Harm is also unevenly distributed. Socio-economic status is a key overlooked vulnerability. Children from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to engage in risky behaviours such as seeking new contacts online, report higher exposure to self-harm content, and express higher levels of worry across several categories of online risk. At the same time, they often report fewer coping mechanisms and fewer digital skills. Bans may therefore amplify inequality: children with more parental, educational and economic resources may retain guidance, access and support, while others lose opportunities without becoming safer.
7. GenAI adds a newer layer of risk already present. European children are increasingly using AI tools for learning, recommendations, advice-seeking and even mental health support. These systems can simulate empathy and authority in ways that build trust, even when the information they provide is unreliable. The EU must address the epistemic, wellbeing and environmental costs of AI for children, not wait until these services become the next under-regulated space where risks are displaced.
8. Poorly designed regulation is itself a risk. Intrusive age checks, broad bans or unclear restrictions can infringe children’s rights to information, participation, privacy and evolving autonomy. In the name of protecting children, they may produce a rollback of children’s rights. And they weaken the legitimacy of regulation: rules that are blunt, easily circumvented or out of step with children’s actual digital lives risk eroding trust in adults, regulators, platforms and the promises of protection.

This is why regulation must assess adverse consequences for different groups of children across different contexts and services. Complex problems require precise, evidence-based and rights-respecting solutions. Children are worth that complexity.

What we’re not saying

We are not arguing that nothing should change, or that current risks are acceptable. But a ban does not respect children’s voices as the European Youth Forum has highlighted, nor does it respect children’s civil rights and freedoms, or their development and evolving capacities.

Children are growing up in a digital world, and it is vital that that world enables them to grow, flourish, express themselves and participate in ways that are safe and non-exploitative. Evidence from Australia shows the limits of this approach in practice: two in three children aged 8–15 still hold Instagram or TikTok accounts, and no significant drop in reported online harm has followed. A ban that platforms can quietly absorb, while continuing business as usual elsewhere, protects no one.

The alternative we’re proposing is not laissez-faire. It is firmer: mandatory standards, independent audits, real penalties and a Code of Conduct that follows children wherever they actually spend their time online. It should now be enforced, at last, as EU law has already developed strong interconnecting rules and guidelines covering most, though not all, aspects of the digital environment. And regulation can work.

As we said, complex problems require complex solutions. Regulation should be accompanied by:

• A sustained, child-centred longitudinal evidence base: Scale up independent, comparative and longitudinal research on children’s digital lives, including risks, opportunities, inequalities and adverse consequences of regulation.
• Children’s participation in policy design, especially less- and never-heard groups. Regulation that children do not understand or recognise as relevant is less likely to protect them.
• School-based digital resilience: Scale up digital and media literacy through schools to reduce socio-economic gaps in skills, safety and opportunity. Schools are crucial to avoiding a “rich get richer” digital divide.
• Information and practical support for parents and trusted adults: Provide clear, non-alarmist guidance, accessible complaint routes, local-language resources that help parents/adults support children without increasing fear or surveillance, and child-friendly help and remedy. Support via schools and trusted government agencies is more likely to succeed.

The authors are part of EU Kids Online, a multinational research network seeking to enhance knowledge of European children’s online opportunities, risks and safety.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.

Image credit: DavideAngelini provided by Shutterstock.