Onlykashmir.in News Desk
The European Union is set to unveil a sweeping new legislative measure aimed at shielding children from the harms of social media, with the European Commission scheduled to present the proposal on September 17 in Brussels. The move follows more than a year of intense internal deliberation and mounting pressure from member states, parent groups and child-safety advocates across the twenty-seven-nation bloc.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is expected to address the issue directly a day earlier in a speech before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where she is likely to outline the broader rationale behind the legislation and the urgency driving it. The proposal, being informally referred to as the “EU Kids Act,” will be jointly presented by von der Leyen and the Commission’s technology chief, Henna Virkkunen, marking one of the most significant regulatory interventions in the digital space that the EU has undertaken in recent years.
At the heart of the debate is the question of a minimum age for children to access social media platforms. Brussels has been weighing two competing thresholds: barring access entirely for children under 13, an option recommended by an independent expert panel that studied the psychological and developmental effects of early social media use, or raising the bar to under 15, a stricter threshold championed by France. Greece has also been among the more vocal member states pushing for firmer safeguards, reflecting a broader unease among several European governments over unregulated platform access for minors.
The initiative arrives amid a global reckoning over the mental health toll of social media on young users, with regulators from Australia to several EU capitals moving in parallel toward stricter age verification and platform accountability rules. For the European Union, the Kids Act represents an attempt to translate years of advocacy, research and public concern into binding law, potentially setting a template that other jurisdictions may look to replicate.
Details of enforcement mechanisms, verification standards and penalties for non-compliant platforms are expected to be clarified once the full text of the proposal is made public. Industry observers anticipate that major technology companies will closely scrutinise the legislation, given the scale of the EU market and its history of shaping global regulatory norms through measures such as the General Data Protection Regulation and the Digital Services Act.
