“My daughter Marie was a sunny girl. She liked music, dancing and being creative,” said Stephanie Mistre, a French activist supporting victims of the harmful effects social media.
“She left us on 16 September 2021. I discovered the morbid reality of my daughter’s life on TikTok only a month after her death.”
Mistre was aware that her child had been seeking a way to lose weight online. But she hadn’t known that she’d become the target of a dark algorithm full of self-harm and depressive content.
“We have all the evidence. Now is the time to force the platforms to protect our children against dangers, [and] to get rid of addictive features,” said Mistre in a panel discussion alongside other digital rights groups on Thursday (10 September).
On Friday, Mistre’s advocacy group, Algos Victims, addressed a letter to Ursula von der Leyen alongside the Italian organisation MOIGE, a parents movement, urging the commission president to stay true to her promise from the last state of the union.
“Europe believes in parents, not in profits,” von der Leyen (herself a mother of seven) told the European Parliament in September 2025, while announcing the convocation of a special panel of experts to strengthen online safety for children and crackdown on social media giants.
The panel’s co-chairs presented their final report on 13 July 2026. The recommendations pushed for greater accountability for social media platforms to be responsible for their own safety-by-design backend, effectively putting the onus back on Big Tech rather than parents.
The panel suggested a social media ban for under 13s, as well as targeting addictive and features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, and personalised algorithms – which the commission president had seemingly welcomed.
“In Europe, whoever develops a product is responsible for its safety,” von der Leyen had said in response to the report in July.
But that picture looks to be changing shape in the lead to 2026’s state of the union speech.
