Parents, privacy, parliaments: The battle begins for von der Leyen’s social media ban  

BRUSSELS — Ursula von der Leyen’s bill to keep young Europeans off social media is an ambitious response to the growing outcry over the potential harm of TikTok, Instagram and other online platforms. Making the restrictions a reality will require a whole new level of ambition.

The European Commission must now negotiate with national governments and technologists to figure out exactly how to impose a law across Europe that would ban kids under 13 from social media, and severely restrict access for those under 15 — all without trampling on privacy of young and old alike in the process of verifying users’ age. 

Reducing the harms of social media on youth has been a top priority for the Commission president, a medical doctor and mother of seven who has repeatedly decried the internet’s impact on the health of minors since her 2025 State of the Union speech.  

“If a platform wants to access the children or the teenagers, the minors, they have to prove first that they are safe,” she told reporters on Thursday as she officially unveiled the EU Kids Act, the day after again touting her leadership on the issue in this year’s annual address. 

The EU’s proposed measures come after Australia imposed the first-ever national social media ban in December 2025, blocking under-16s from creating accounts on major platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. Australia’s ban has had limited impact so far, with a large percentage of kids still having access to social media, which Canberra blames on the platforms’ lack of compliance.  

A fierce global campaign by parents and mental health professionals has been warning that social media platforms lead to a range of ills including addiction, social isolation and depression. 

Child rights campaigners and some EU governments have argued that blanket bans are not the way to go, violating young people’s rights to information and expression. Their concerns were integrated into the new proposal, which attempts to reconcile sometimes conflicting considerations and targets online channels beyond traditional social media, including AI chatbots and video games.  

But the nuances in the legislation will only add to the challenge of making the law a reality.

The EU’s proposal would effectively bar anyone under 13 from creating accounts on social media and video-sharing platforms, while severely restricting teens aged 13 to 15 from using these services independently. Services like video game platforms and AI chatbots have to follow safety-by-design principles that don’t encourage compulsive use among kids. 

Balancing act  

The proposal also takes into account the different approaches that EU capitals were already developing in their national measures. The two most important capitals to balance are Paris and Berlin, which are calling for bans for under-15s and under-13s, respectively. The Kids Act’s tiered approach, which includes different restrictions at each age, could keep both capitals happy.  

Finalizing the rules will be an uphill battle for European legislators. The 55-page proposal needs approval from national governments and the European Parliament. The national bills would effectively be scrapped by the Commission’s EU-wide proposal. 

Estonia may be a particularly thorny negotiator, having publicly opposed any such bans or age limits. Rome, a major European player, has also so far decided against social media restrictions. The Netherlands’ digital minister, Willemijn Aerdts, said in comments that the country supports the proposal but would still prefer the minimum age to be set at 15. A spokesperson for Spain’s digital ministry also emphasized their existing efforts to set a threshold at 16.  

Still, given the outcry from parent groups and rising popular opposition to tech platforms, many EU capitals have an incentive to get this done quickly.  

Ireland’s digital minister Patrick O’Donovan, who last week was very publicly pushing for the ban to be set at 15, struck a conciliatory note Thursday. “I think the nature of these things is that you strive for the highest possible ideals, make your case, and now is the time to examine the implementation and process around delivery of change,” O’Donovan said. “We are united in our shared purpose here.”  

The Commission wants to conclude negotiations within the next 8 to 12 months, a senior Commission official told reporters. It’s not the length or complexity of the rules, but the urgency that the various legislators feel that will determine the speed of negotiations, the official added.  

Still, the required procedures would bring the implementation date to mid-2028 since the law includes a six-month transition period.  

The target is an ambitious one for the EU’s legislative process. Other landmark tech laws, such as the Digital Services Act, have taken more than two years to negotiate.  

Child rights groups have expressed trepidation about the proposal’s focus on parental controls. An excessive focus on parents controlling their kids’ online lives could be too invasive and disadvantage kids whose parents are unable to spend much time with them, Sørine Vesth Rasmussen, senior advisor on tech policy and children’s rights at the Danish civil society group Børns Vilkår, said.

In a statement, Greece’s Digital Minister Dimitris Papastergiou said that parents shouldn’t be overly burdened by the legislation, and that primary responsibility should lie with the platforms.

Privacy concerns 

A key sticking point, all agree, could be the law’s implications for privacy rights. Since the rules mandate age verification to access social media, people will have to prove their age by sharing a digital version of their ID. Privacy activists warn that governments or companies could use this procedure to track what people (of any age) are doing online, while also creating a tempting target for hackers. 

“The EU Kids Act is shaping up to be a disaster for the open internet, dressed up as child protection,” said Arya Haager, from digital rights NGO epicenter.works.”It turns identity verification into the price of admission for going online at all.”  

Haager said the law would quietly build a “surveillance infrastructure around family data” to prove not only the age of young users, but also connect them to adult guardians who can supervise their accounts. This data could “later be repurposed to exclude people based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation,” she said.  

Widespread age verification requirements, warned Jurgita Miseviciute, head of public policy with privacy-focused tech firm Proton, would “create an open door through which every law-abiding adult and child in Europe can be at best surveilled, and targeted by criminals at worst.” 

Speaking on Thursday, Commission tech chief Henna Virkkunen said the law creates a “robust” age-verification framework. “Proving your age online should be easy, and it should reveal nothing else about you, absolutely nothing else [other] than your age,” she said. 

Still, the Commission concedes that the proposed law isn’t perfect, and that circumvention is possible. Instead, they see it as the first step to a long process of changing people’s attitudes about safety.  

“This is about getting clearly the message (out) to everyone. It is not about catching every single individual,” a senior Commission official said. “The point is to create a societal change that is stable and persistent.” 

This article has been updated.