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The European Union wants to establish new boundaries for the relationship between children, teenagers and digital platforms.
The proposal presented by the European Commission includes age-based access restrictions and new obligations for services used by minors. But the proposal goes beyond determining who can or cannot create an account: personalised advertising, certain recommendation systems and mechanisms designed to prolong time spent on platforms are also part of the discussion.
In practice, Europe is beginning to debate not only when a child should be allowed to join a social network, but how that network should operate once they do.
The debate is taking place in a deeply connected society. Social media is already part of communication, entertainment, commerce and the wider economy. At the same time, children and teenagers are among the audiences most present in this environment.
This creates a dilemma: how to protect minors without ignoring the fact that digital life is already part of contemporary society.
There is another important issue. To enforce age limits, platforms need to know whether they are dealing with a child or an adult — which also raises questions around privacy and identity verification. The Commission is working on a solution designed to verify a user’s age range without revealing their full identity.
Perhaps the most significant transformation being proposed by Europe is not the minimum age.
It is responsibility.
For years, much of the logic of the internet has placed the responsibility on users — or, in the case of children, on their parents — to manage screen time, privacy, content and exposure.
The new regulatory direction attempts to reverse that relationship: it would no longer be solely the user who needs to learn how to protect themselves from the platform. The platform would have to demonstrate that its product was built to protect the user.
This shift could directly affect the economic model of social media platforms.
Features such as algorithmic recommendations, notifications, personalised advertising and infinite scroll are not simply design choices. They help capture something extremely valuable in the digital economy: attention.
The longer we remain connected, the greater the opportunities for engagement, advertising and consumption.
Requiring safer products by design could therefore force companies to rethink design, algorithms, advertising, artificial intelligence and even revenue models.
This does not necessarily mean weakening the digital economy. It could mean establishing a new condition for its growth: trust.
After decades in which the central question has been how to keep users connected for longer, perhaps we are entering a phase in which companies will also have to answer another question: at what cost?
How far should platforms’ responsibility extend when it comes to the way their products influence the people who use them?
