MEPs call for changes to platforms, alongside age limits for access to social media

Kim van Sparrentak warns that excluding children from social media leaves unresolved the mechanisms that encourage compulsive use, while Alex Agius Saliba supports both a minimum age and the elimination of manipulative practices. Reactions to the Commission’s announcement on the EU Kids Act raise the issue of protecting all users and enforcing existing obligations.

Protecting children on social media must include changing how platforms operate, MEPs Kim van Sparrentak and Alex Agius Saliba said in the debate on the state of the Union in Strasbourg. Their interventions followed Ursula von der Leyen’s announcement of age-differentiated access restrictions and insisted on companies’ responsibility for features that encourage compulsive use.

In brief

1. Kim van Sparrentak calls for a ban on addictive design and warns that restrictions for children alone do not make platforms safe for other users.

2. Alex Agius Saliba supports a minimum access age, together with the removal of manipulative interfaces. The two interventions place different emphasis, without presenting age-based protection and platform reform as incompatible options.

3. The Commission announces the EU Kids Act and, separately, a Digital Fairness Act with a broader scope of protection. The announcements do not constitute new rules that are already applicable.

4. The Digital Services Act already imposes obligations to protect minors. The Commission’s guidelines explain concrete measures, such as disabling autoplay by default and modifying content recommendations.

In her speech, the Commission President announced a three-tier model. Children under 13 would not have access to social media; between the ages of 13 and 15, they could use only limited accounts, created and supervised by parents or guardians, for no more than one hour a day. For those aged between 15 and 18, platforms would have safe-design obligations. The presentation of the EU Kids Act proposal is scheduled for 17 September.

Dutch MEP Kim van Sparrentak, from the Greens/European Free Alliance group, warned that removing children from platforms without fundamentally changing how they operate would leave the risks to health, safety and democracy unresolved. She called for the future Digital Fairness Act to ban addictive design and protect all users. Her intervention addressed the limits of a policy focused on access, without explicitly rejecting any minimum age.

Malta’s MEP Alex Agius Saliba, vice-president of the Socialists and Democrats group, explicitly supported an age threshold, as well as interventions targeting digital products. He referred to the repetitive consumption of negative content and called for the removal of interfaces that manipulate users’ choices, as well as firm enforcement of the rules. His position aims both to reduce the time children spend in front of screens and to protect consumers who continue to use the platforms.

The Commission also announced that it will propose a Digital Fairness Act this autumn, acknowledging that addictive design also affects adults. Von der Leyen said platforms would have to demonstrate that they are safe. The speech establishes this political intention without detailing the procedure through which companies would be expected to prove safety or how the new requirements would be monitored.

Changing platforms can mean intervening in very specific features. In the guidelines for the protection of minors, published in July 2025, the Commission recommends disabling autoplay, push notifications and mechanisms that reward maintaining a daily streak of interactions by default. For content recommendations, it proposes giving greater weight to the child’s explicit choices than to signals inferred from their behaviour. These are measures that change the user experience after accessing the service.

Legal obligations already exist as well. Article 28 of the Digital Services Act, DSA, requires platforms covered by these provisions to take appropriate and proportionate measures for the safety and privacy of minors. Separately, very large platforms and search engines must offer, for each recommendation system used, at least one option that does not rely on profiling. This does not mean eliminating all algorithms.

The Commission’s guidelines are non-binding recommendations, used as a benchmark for assessing compliance with the DSA; the obligations in the regulation remain applicable. Age verification also raises the issue of the data collected. In a position published in July, Agius Saliba had called for mechanisms that protect privacy and warned against leaving age assessment and the monitoring of all users exclusively in the hands of platforms.

The announced proposal must clarify how ages will be verified, how the time limit will operate and which features will be permitted in supervised accounts. For MEPs calling for design changes, these are questions distinct from the obligation on platforms to reduce product risks. An access limit determines who can enter; design rules determine what experience is offered to the person who enters.