The European Union is preparing its broadest attempt yet to put an age boundary around digital life. According to Reuters, the European Commission is set to propose restricting under-15s from social media, video-sharing platforms, AI chatbots, and online games as part of an EU Kids Act.
The proposal would create a digital age ladder
The plan is not described as a single switch that shuts every young teenager out of the internet. It would create different levels of access. Children aged 15 and over could set up their own accounts. Those aged 13 and 14 could use introductory social media and video-sharing accounts only if a parent opens them, with parental controls, limited contacts, and strict time limits.
Children between three and 12 would have fully parent-controlled accounts limited to child-friendly services with strict safety standards. Under-3s would have no access to the services covered by the proposal.
The Commission document reportedly also calls for platforms to avoid addictive designs and harmful feeds. Children would need simple tools for reporting harmful content, while parents would receive more effective control features. Social and video platforms would have to verify a user’s age when a new account is opened. Online game platforms would reportedly need to verify age before a game can be downloaded.
This moves child safety from guidance into product architecture
The significant shift is where the responsibility sits. The proposal would ask platforms to build age checks, account permissions, feed restrictions, reporting tools, and parental controls into the service itself. It would also require companies to pay a supervisory fee to support regulatory enforcement.
That matters because today’s minimum-age rules often depend on users declaring their age and platforms enforcing broad restrictions after the fact. A system based on verified age bands would affect onboarding, recommendation systems, messaging, game distribution, and possibly the way AI assistants decide who can access them, another sign that identity and trust signals are becoming platform infrastructure.
The proposal still has a long way to go. EU countries and the European Parliament would need to debate and revise it over the coming months before it could become law, and Reuters notes that the details may change before the Commission presents the plan.
But the direction is already clear: child protection is becoming a demand for different products, not simply better safety messaging. Platforms that treat age as a checkbox may increasingly have to treat it as a core part of the user experience.