The EU Commission’s Special Panel on Child Safety Online has rejected a blanket ban on social media for minors, favoring a model where responsibility rests with the providers rather than families. Ursula von der Leyen has signaled that childhood access should be earned rather than granted at an arbitrary threshold. Despite this shift, current regulatory efforts against Meta illustrate a glaring inefficiency: the case regarding addictive features like infinite scroll and autoplay took over two years to reach a preliminary finding. By the time fines are issued, the damage to a generation of users is already entrenched.
Brussels moves to shift the burden of proof onto Big Tech
Seventy-five percent of Europeans want social media platforms to prove their products are safe before children gain access, according to a recent YouGov poll. This public demand aligns with the EU Commission’s latest findings, which identify addictive design features on Instagram and Facebook as clear breaches of the Digital Services Act.
To move beyond lengthy litigation, the Commission must implement an ex-ante certification regime. This would require platforms to disable addictive features by default and ensure that privacy protections are non-negotiable. Without a mechanism to force compliance before a product hits the market, companies will continue to treat regulatory fines as an acceptable cost of doing business. True reform requires pairing these standards with interoperability, allowing users to migrate to safer alternatives without losing their social networks. If the upcoming proposal from von der Leyen fails to mandate these structural changes, the EU will remain trapped in a cycle of retroactive enforcement that fails to protect the children it aims to serve.
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