Europe’s Next Tech Target: Child Safety | #childsafety | #kids | #chldern | #parents | #schoolsafey

When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gives her State of the Union address in mid-September, the Brussels tech community will focus on her promised proposals to keep children safe. It’s the highest-profile tech dossier on her agenda, overshadowing both the bloc’s antitrust crackdown and artificial intelligence regulation. 

What von der Leyen will announce remains unclear. She could call for a complete ban on under-13s or under-16s accessing social media. Or she could opt for a partial restriction. Her proposal could be limited to social media or extended to potentially all other types of Internet platforms, from messaging devices to online marketplaces.  

How Europe plans to achieve age gating represents another unanswered question. Will each website or app be required to verify birthdates? Or will that responsibility fall on Apple, Google, and Microsoft, who operate dominant app stores and operating systems? 

Expect close judicial scrutiny. France’s top court recently struck down a ban on social media for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression. Will Europe’s other courts make similar objections? France has since banned mobile phones in schools. 

Although the answers to these questions could provoke transatlantic tensions if US companies feel singled out, child safety offers a rare opportunity for transatlantic cooperation on a key digital issue. In order to settle a US suit, Meta recently agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion and to make major changes to its products over claims that its Facebook and Instagram platforms designed a deliberately addictive product and targeted it at children.  

US lawmakers are advancing legislation, starting with the Kids Online Safety Act, which would mandate age verification restrictions on pornography and empower parents to block content. A proposed update to the 1998 Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act would extend federal privacy protections — which previously only covered children under 13 — to teenagers up to age 16. 

Within Europe, national governments are pushing their own solutions. France, Spain, Austria, Germany, and Greece are all pursuing full social media bans for children in different age groups. Support for such measures comes from both the right and left. Politically beleaguered governments (think France and Spain) find a social media ban to be a popular initiative. Ireland, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, has made online child safety one of its priorities and is pushing for an EU-wide approach to age verification.  

“A lot of momentum is building,” Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin says. “We are anticipating fairly concrete proposals and ideas, and I think there is an opportunity for a European-wide position in respect to protecting children online.” 

Clues about the upcoming proposal came in an EU Child Safety report, commissioned by von der Leyen and authored by a German child psychiatrist and a French public health specialist. The experts recommend a minimum age of 13 — a lower threshold than those adopted or proposed in countries such as Australia — for accessing online platforms. They place the onus on platforms to prove their safety, opening the door to increased regulation of tech at a time when von der Leyen has been pushing to limit new rules in order to increase European competitiveness. 

The child safety report fails to clarify who will enforce these new rules. Instead of determining what services are in scope, it creates a new category of “social media+,” suggesting that almost all online activity be covered, potentially including AI chatbots, video sharing, messaging services, and e-commerce marketplaces. 

How to verify age remains unclear, too. The child safety report authors say verification must be “proportionate,” preserve privacy, and explicitly bar ID or biometric data, without saying how these goals can be achieved.   

The report contains “blind spots that merit additional attention to ensure that subsequent policy developments strike a delicate, yet critical, balance between protecting children online and safeguarding fundamental rights,” warns the Center for Technology and Democracy, a Washington-based digital rights think tank.  

Without clarity, some companies are threatening to stop serving European consumers. In reaction to a law requiring porn sites to take extra steps to verify their users’ ages, Pornhub blocked access in France. It returned after a Paris court suspended the law.  

Parents and child protection advocates are demanding reinforced age verification, limits on targeted advertising, and increased protection from cyberbullying, among other requirements. Some compare the addictive designs of online platforms to the addictive pull of smoking, drugs, or alcohol. 

It’s important to both restrict access and increase protection, to combine “age restrictions with design reforms,” says Beatrijs Gelders, a policy officer at the Confederation of Family Organisations in Brussels. Otherwise, “there’s a risk companies will rely on restrictions instead of redesigning products.”  

For many European child rights activists, Brazil represents a model. Its digital law, adopted in 2025, requires services likely to be used by children to ban behavioral advertising based on profiling minors, and puts responsibility on companies to design products around children’s best interests. Violations can bring fines, suspension, or even a ban. 

“Brazil is the gold standard,” says Desara Dushi, a child safety expert and Affiliated Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. “It protects children without simply shutting them out of the digital world. The responsibility stays on companies to make their services safe.” 

Yet these goals remain difficult to achieve. Australia’s experience is instructive. Three months after banning under-16s from accessing social media, 81% of teens were still using restricted platforms. More than half of children on restricted platforms reported that their age was never checked.  

Australia, Brazil, Europe, and the US agree that the era of tech self-regulating child safety must end. Protecting children has become a political priority. But how to move forward remains unclear and uncertain. 

William Echikson is a senior fellow at CEPA and editor of Bandwidth. 

Aiko Iguchi was a Brussels-based intern with CEPA’S Tech Policy Program. 

Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.