The European Commission on Thursday unveiled the EU Kids Act, a sweeping regulatory proposal that would ban children under 13 from opening social media accounts across the 27-nation bloc and impose strict new rules on how platforms treat every user under 18. The plan, presented in Brussels by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and technology chief Henna Virkkunen, is the EU's most far-reaching attempt yet to regulate how young people experience the internet, extending well beyond the platform-transparency rules already in force under the bloc's Digital Services Act.
"No social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15," von der Leyen said in presenting the proposal — a summary that captures the plan's headline effect, even though the underlying rules are more layered than a single cutoff.
How the age tiers work
Under the draft, children younger than 13 would be barred from opening social media accounts outright. Those aged 13 and 14 could use only limited "mini accounts" set up and monitored by a parent or guardian, with restricted features and daily time limits. Full, independently created accounts would be reserved for users 15 and older, though even they would be entitled to "safe by design" versions of platforms. The rules extend beyond social networks to video-sharing sites, online games and AI companion chatbots, and they would bar strangers from messaging minors or targeting them with personalized ads or recommendation feeds built on their past activity.
The obligations fall on services that qualify as "very large online platforms" under the Digital Services Act — the biggest social networks, video platforms and app stores. They would have to submit compliance plans to the Commission, ban addictive design features such as infinite scroll and nighttime push notifications, and adopt a forthcoming open-source EU age-verification tool that Brussels says is due to launch by the end of the year.
Shifting the burden of proof
The proposal's central legal shift is over who has to prove what. "Our KIDS Act is reversing the burden of proof — it is for platforms to show they are safe by design," von der Leyen said, according to the trade publication IAPP. Regulators would be able to fast-track investigations, with a target of concluding cases within 90 days, and fines for violations could reach 6% of a company's global annual revenue — the same ceiling used elsewhere in the bloc's digital rulebook.
Virkkunen framed the plan as giving families more control rather than taking it away. "We give parents the tools to accompany their kids to navigate a safe digital world," she said.
The proposal follows years of European frustration with platforms' self-policing on minors, and it echoes, in stricter form, age-verification pushes already underway in Australia, France and several U.S. states. The Commission has been careful to describe its age-verification tool as "privacy preserving," an acknowledgment of the tension between checking a user's age and collecting more data about them in the process.
Industry groups were quick to raise concerns. CCIA Europe, which represents major technology companies including several of the platforms the law would target, warned that age-verification systems carry their own risks: "Collecting age information...would undoubtedly create an attractive target for cybercriminals." Germany's digital industry association, Bitkom, separately argued that reliable age verification remains a difficult technical problem and that layering new obligations atop existing Digital Services Act requirements could create confusion for companies already navigating that law.
The Kids Act now moves to the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, where member states and lawmakers can rewrite it before any final vote — a process that has taken well over a year in past fights over the bloc's digital rulebook. France's constitutional court previously struck down a national social-media age-verification law on free-expression grounds, a precedent that could shape how far EU negotiators are willing to push the final text.
