On Monday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU will propose bloc-wide limits on children using Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook after the summer.
Her framing was the headline:
"This is not about whether children can access social media. It is about whether and when social media can access our children."
Australia set the template. In December 2025 it became the first country to ban social media for under-16s. Since then, Greece, Austria, Poland, Lithuania, Slovenia, and the UK have changed their own age rules. Ireland and Denmark held back, betting an EU-wide law would be easier to enforce on the platforms than a patchwork of national ones.
THE PRIVACY CATCH IS IN THE ENFORCEMENT
To keep under-16s out, a platform has to check everyone's age — not just kids. In practice that means one of three things:
• an ID upload,
• a face scan estimating your age, or
• a third-party age-verification service that holds one more copy of your identity.
Every one of those collects more data on every user to solve a problem about some users.
Supporters say that's the price of protecting children from algorithmic feeds. Critics point out two things: it expands identity collection across the entire adult population, and teens already route around age gates with a VPN in about thirty seconds.
WHAT TO WATCH
Two details decide whether this protects kids or just grows the surveillance footprint:
Does the proposal mandate a specific verification method, or let platforms choose the least invasive one?
Who stores the verification results — the platform, a government system, or a private vendor — and for how long?
The proposal lands after the summer. We'll read it so you don't have to.