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The European Union is preparing to unveil one of the most sweeping child safety proposals to reach Brussels’ formal legislative pipeline, a law that would block children under 13 from opening social media accounts entirely and introduce new restrictions on how teenagers interact with AI chatbots, video-sharing platforms, and online games. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen are set to formally present the proposal, dubbed the EU Kids Act, in Strasbourg this week, following weeks of mounting pressure from member states including France and Greece to move beyond patchwork national rules toward a unified, bloc-wide approach.
The structure of the proposed law is built around age tiers rather than a single blanket cutoff. According to draft text reviewed by multiple outlets ahead of the formal presentation, children under 13 would face an outright prohibition on accessing major social networking platforms. Those aged 13 and 14 could still get onto social media and video-sharing platforms, but only through introductory accounts set up by a parent or guardian, with restricted contact lists and strict time limits built in. Anyone 15 or older would be free to open their own account without that parental gateway. That tiered approach mirrors, in a general sense, the kind of age-graduated systems already being discussed or implemented in individual EU countries, but it would apply the same baseline rules across all 27 member states simultaneously rather than leaving enforcement to each government’s own separate legislation.
What sets this proposal apart from earlier child safety pushes, including Australia’s under-16 social media ban that helped accelerate momentum for this kind of legislation globally, is how far beyond traditional social media the restrictions extend. The draft explicitly covers AI chatbots and online games alongside social networking and video-sharing platforms, with the text specifically referencing “tailored commitments” for chatbots and games rather than treating them as an afterthought bolted onto social media rules. That inclusion reflects a genuine shift in where regulators believe the real risk to children now sits. Services like ChatGPT have increasingly come under scrutiny not just for content moderation failures but for the nature of sustained, one-on-one interaction they enable, a concern that’s been echoed in parallel legislative pushes in the UK, where officials have specifically flagged children forming ongoing personal relationships with AI systems that were never designed with child safety as a core consideration.
Beyond simply restricting access by age, the EU Kids Act would impose structural design requirements on platforms themselves, forcing what the draft calls “safe by design” defaults for young users. Children’s accounts would need to remain private automatically, with risky settings disabled unless deliberately changed, and unknown adult users would be blocked from contacting minors by default. The proposal also targets specific engagement mechanics that child safety advocates have long criticized as deliberately addictive, including infinite scrolling, artificial notification patterns, and certain reward-loop features common across major platforms. That list closely tracks concerns Brussels raised earlier this year when it singled out TikTok and Meta specifically over features including autoplay, endless scrolling, and push notifications, questioning at the time whether Meta in particular was doing enough to keep younger children off its platforms in the first place.
Enforcement of any age-based system this granular depends heavily on reliable age verification, a technical and practical challenge that has bedeviled similar legislation in other jurisdictions. The European Commission has said its own age-verification app is ready for deployment and has urged member states to make it available to users by the end of this year, a timeline that would need to hold if the broader Kids Act framework is going to function as intended once it eventually becomes law. That said, age-estimation technology broadly remains an imperfect tool. Independent testing of similar systems elsewhere has documented frequent false positives that lock legitimate adult users out of services, alongside false negatives that let minors slip past the very restrictions the technology is meant to enforce, a tension regulators writing this legislation will need to address more concretely as the proposal moves through negotiation.
Getting from a draft proposal to actual enforceable law will take considerably longer than this week’s Strasbourg presentation suggests on its own. Like any EU legislation of this scope, the Kids Act will require negotiation and agreement between the European Parliament and individual member states before it takes legal effect, a process that can stretch on for months or years depending on how much resistance emerges from industry lobbying or disagreement among national governments over specific provisions. Educational technology providers have already begun pushing back on parts of the draft, warning that overly broad definitions of what counts as a restricted “AI chatbot” could inadvertently disrupt legitimate digital learning tools already embedded in European classrooms, a concern regulators will likely need to address through narrower carve-outs before the text is finalized.
The commercial stakes behind this legislation are considerable, and not just for the platforms directly named in early coverage of the draft. Minors represent a genuinely lucrative advertising demographic, particularly for gaming microtransactions, fast fashion, and consumer electronics marketed specifically at younger audiences, meaning restrictions on data collection, targeted advertising, and account access for under-15s would meaningfully reshape revenue streams these companies have built over years around exactly that user base. That commercial dimension helps explain why the proposal has drawn such intense advance interest from major platforms even before its formal text has been published.
The EU Kids Act also arrives as part of a broader international wave rather than an isolated European initiative. The UK is separately pursuing its own under-16 social media ban alongside efforts to close gaps in its 2023 Online Safety Act specifically around one-to-one AI chatbot interactions, while individual EU members including France, Spain, Greece, and Slovenia have already moved or signaled intent to move on their own national restrictions independent of whatever Brussels ultimately passes. Canada has floated a similar under-16 ban despite pushback from both the UK and Australian experience with comparable legislation. Taken together, these parallel efforts suggest child safety regulation targeting social media and AI chatbots has shifted from a niche policy debate into one of the more active fronts in global technology regulation, with the EU’s version now poised to become one of the most comprehensive frameworks attempted anywhere once, and if, it clears the full legislative process.
For more coverage of technology regulation and child safety policy developments, visit Business Tech.
