In a working document entitled ‘Protecting Minors from Online harms and risks: Age verification, age appropriate design and a pan-European digital age of majority’ a copy of which Agence Europe has been able to obtain, Paris, Madrid and Athens have called on the EU to make it “imperative to establish the principle of a digital-age majority for online social networks”.
The three co-signatory Member States state that the design of social networks, their algorithms and the way they operate expose young children and European minors to “trivial content” and can lead to “heightened anxiety, depression, and self-esteem issues”, linked to screen addiction and comparison with the most popular content.
To remedy this, they are calling on the European Commission to introduce a European regulatory framework aimed at limiting young people’s access to the most addictive content through “age-appropriate logos” and for “mandatory and built-in age verification solutions and parental control software”.
“The intent of this non-paper is neither to criminalise the use of technology, nor to propose unenforceable solutions to an ever-growing challenge”, say the signatory countries, who are anxious to maintain an approach centred around the protection of minors. The three Member States have already launched national initiatives to take the lead in the face of the Commission’s slowness.
France and Greece both support a ban on social networking sites for under-15s, an initiative that has not met with unanimous approval within the EU. Spain has approved a bill introducing mandatory parental controls and a digital age verification system.
The European Commission, for its part, is preparing the launch of an EU-wide age verification application as a temporary solution, prior to the roll-out of European Digital Identity Wallets, known as ‘EiDs’, at the end of 2026 (see EUROPE 13414/23).
According to several sources, the document has not yet been sent to the European Commission, with the three capital cities hoping to rally other Member States to their cause before the Telecommunications Council takes place on 6 June, where the document will be presented and debated.
Read the document: https://aeur.eu/f/gwd (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)