New EU social media ban would bar under-13s across Europe

Europe is preparing to put its youngest internet users behind an age wall. In her annual State of the Union address in Strasbourg on Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled the Kids Act, a proposal that would ban children under 13 from social media across all 27 member states of the European Union. The Commission formally presented the plan on Thursday, setting up what would become the largest age-based restriction on social media anywhere in the world, covering roughly 450 million people.

The EU social media ban goes well beyond existing platform policies. According to the announcement, no child under 13 could hold a social media account at all. Young people aged 13 and 14 could keep accounts only under parental supervision, with limited features and daily screen time capped at one hour. Independent personal accounts would be off-limits until age 15, reported by Reuters and CNN.

A leaked draft of the proposal, published by the news outlets Contexte and Euractiv on Tuesday, suggests the youngest children face even tighter rules. Children under three would have no access to the covered services, while those between three and twelve could use only child-friendly services that remain fully controlled by their parents.

What the EU social media ban would cover

The target is broader than social media alone. The Commission describes the scope as "social media plus," a category covering services judged to pose the greatest risks to minors. That includes major social media platforms, video-sharing services, some online video games, and conversational artificial intelligence services and chatbots. Although the documents name no companies, the definition would in practice capture giants such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, ChatGPT, and the game Roblox, according to Le Monde.

Educational services, platforms used by public authorities, and industrial or professional AI tools would sit outside the rules. The proposal also reaches past simple age gates into the design of the apps themselves. Platforms would have to disable addictive design features for minors, such as infinite content scrolling and notifications engineered to maximize engagement. Recommendation algorithms would face new scrutiny and would have to be customizable by teenagers in a transparent way, according to Le Monde's reporting on the draft.

The proposal reverses the burden of proof. Platforms would have to demonstrate that their services are safe for minors rather than waiting for regulators to prove harm. Video games would need to be transparent about microtransactions and virtual currencies, and to drop features that encourage intensive use, such as penalties for players who fail to log in every day. AI chatbots would have to be presented in a non-intrusive manner.

Enforcement would carry serious financial weight. Companies would pay a supervisory fee to fund regulators, and breaches of the minors' rules would fall under enforcement of the EU's Digital Services Act, where penalties can reach up to 6% of a company's global turnover.

How the age checks would work

The enforcement backbone of the EU social media ban is a tool Brussels built itself: a free, open-source smartphone app for age verification that the Commission presented in April 2026. The app tells a platform only whether a user clears an age threshold, without revealing the user's identity, according to Reuters.

Seven countries are already piloting the system: Cyprus, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. The Commission expects EU-wide availability by the end of 2026. The app is also slated for use in proving that users are over 18 when visiting adult sites, a requirement already in place under the Digital Services Act.

The system works in a deliberately privacy-preserving way. A user proves their age once to a nationally designated issuer, which can be a digital ID provider, a bank, or a post office. When that user visits a restricted service, the app certifies only that the age threshold has been met. The platform receives a simple yes-or-no response. Issuance and verification are handled by separate entities, the proof provider is never told which service the proof was used for, and each proof works only once, preventing cross-service tracking. The Commission writes the code and standards, but the system itself is decentralized, with no central EU database of ages, and the proofs live on the user's phone. No identity documents or biometric data are retained, and the open-source code allows independent scrutiny.

Under the proposal, social media and video-sharing platforms would have to verify age when a user creates a new account. For existing accounts, the checks would be proportionate rather than universal: long-registered users, or those who have linked a bank card, could be exempt. The draft could also assign a major role to Apple and Google, which supply most smartphones and would be expected to verify users' ages at the app store level.

The approach differs sharply from Australia's. Canberra legislated a minimum age of 16 for social media last December but prescribed no method and built no state infrastructure, leaving everything to the platforms and commercial vendors. A shadow trial reported by Reuters found that platforms requested age proof on none of 50 test accounts declaring an age of 16. Australian authorities have since doubled maximum fines and threatened court action.

A long road to law, and mixed reactions

The Kids Act is only a proposal. It must be approved by EU member states and the European Parliament before becoming law, and analysts say that process could take years, according to CNN. Several member states are already moving on their own tracks. Greece is legislating an under-15 ban, expects clear convergence with the EU approach, and aims for its law to take effect early next year. Spain's under-16 ban still awaits a parliamentary vote, with the country's digital transformation minister insisting that age systems strike a balance with privacy rights.

France illustrates how contested the ground remains. Last month, the country's Constitutional Council blocked a national under-15 ban, ruling it an unconstitutional and disproportionate infringement on freedom of expression. A new French bill, notified to the Commission on Monday, takes a different approach: rather than an age ban, it would prohibit social network features deemed risky for minors under 15, including endless scrolling, automatic video playback, geolocation, live video streaming, and virtual rewards designed to boost engagement.

The Commission's push follows recommendations from a panel of European experts presented on July 13, which called for a tiered, age-appropriate approach rather than a single cutoff. Von der Leyen justified the urgency in her speech by pointing to young Europeans spending four to six hours a day on screens, describing what she called a capture of their attention, focus, and minds that deprives children of childhood. She linked heavy screen use to loss of sleep, anxiety, and self-harm, and cited the case of a 14-year-old Belgian girl who died by suicide in mid-August after suffering cyberbullying, according to Le Monde.

The rhetoric toward Big Tech was pointed. Von der Leyen told the Parliament that many see the power of large technology companies as impossible to roll back, and that she disagrees: Europe has the power to act, and Europe decides the rules. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez sent a similar message, saying the legislation tells the techno-oligarchs that childhood is protected by democracies.

Whether the plan survives years of negotiation will determine if the EU social media ban becomes the global standard Brussels hopes for. For now, the proposal marks the most ambitious attempt yet by any government to reshape what childhood looks like online, and as one GenZ Newz column argued, the debate over whether such bans protect teens or simply perform protection is only beginning: Teen Social Media Bans Are Political Theater.