Child safety online debate at EuroDIG 2026 shifts focus from bans to platform design

Participants at EuroDIG 2026 debated whether social media age bans are an effective way to protect minors online, with speakers warning that blanket restrictions may oversimplify a far more complex issue involving platform design, digital literacy, privacy, and children’s rights.

The session, titled ‘Youth Online Safety – Are Social Media Age Bans a Solution?’, focused on age verification, platform accountability, recommendation systems, and the broader European regulatory response to online harms affecting children and young people.

Speakers broadly agreed on the objective of improving child safety online, but many questioned whether blanket bans or rigid age restrictions would, in practice, effectively reduce harm.

Diya Aravinthan argued that protecting children online requires approaches that are proportionate, effective, and aligned with how young people actually use digital platforms. She warned that broad social media bans risk pushing children towards workarounds such as VPNs, shared accounts, or alternative services, potentially making online risks harder to monitor rather than reducing them.

Aravinthan also stressed that social media platforms cannot be understood only as sources of harm. She said young people often rely on online spaces for communication, friendships, creativity, civic participation, learning, and access to information.

Referring to Australian research conducted after the country’s under-16 social media restrictions, she said many young people increasingly consume news and current affairs through social media rather than traditional media channels.

Several speakers, therefore, argued that policymakers should focus more on safer platform design and stronger platform accountability rather than treating online safety primarily as an access-control problem.

Aravinthan called for layered protections based on age-appropriate design rather than a binary ‘access or no access’ model. She highlighted stronger privacy defaults, limits on profiling and targeted advertising, and safer platform features for minors as examples of more proportionate safeguards.

She also argued that recommendation systems and algorithmic feeds represent a central challenge because they actively guide minors toward attention-maximising and potentially harmful content.

Lennart Wetzel of Snapchat similarly argued that platforms carry major responsibility for protecting younger users. He said services should invest continuously in safety-by-design features, moderation systems, parental tools, and age-appropriate safeguards. Wetzel also warned that restrictions targeting only selected platforms may simply push young people towards other, potentially less safe or less regulated services.

He cited Australia’s social media restrictions as an example, noting that Snapchat had disabled or locked more than 415,000 accounts in response to the law while also observing migration to alternative services.

The debate also focused heavily on age verification and age assurance technologies.

Several speakers warned that current age-verification systems remain technically imperfect and raise significant privacy, proportionality, and inclusion concerns.

Aravinthan said platforms should not need to know users’ exact identities or precise ages to provide stronger protections for minors. She supported approaches based on data minimisation and privacy-preserving verification.

Wetzel added that even small error rates in age-assurance systems can produce large-scale consequences when applied across millions of users, potentially excluding legitimate users while failing to prevent circumvention.

Carmela Troncoso provided the strongest technical critique of age-verification systems. She argued that making age restrictions difficult to bypass often requires more intrusive forms of surveillance and data collection.

Troncoso warned that some systems rely on biometrics or behavioural analysis, creating additional privacy risks for children and young people. She also said stronger anti-circumvention measures may push minors towards unsafe tools or services that themselves collect and monetise user data.

According to Troncoso, current technologies risk creating substantial privacy and exclusion harms while offering only limited practical effectiveness.

The discussion also explored the wider European regulatory context.

Andrea Tognoni of the European Commission argued that debates about social media bans should not be separated from existing EU frameworks, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), the AI Act, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, and the Better Internet for Kids strategy.

Tognoni said several member states are already advancing national measures on child protection and age restrictions, creating growing pressure for greater European harmonisation.

Speakers repeatedly warned that fragmented national rules could create inconsistent standards across Europe and undermine the coherence of the digital single market.

Wetzel argued that a risk-based European approach under frameworks such as the DSA offers a more sustainable path than isolated national bans.

The session also highlighted concerns that youth voices remain underrepresented in debates surrounding online safety regulation.

Stefanie Quintao of TikTok said many youth-led and child-rights organisations oppose blanket bans and believe they may unintentionally push children into less protected online spaces.

Both Quintao and Aravinthan stressed that young people use digital platforms for far more than entertainment, and that policy discussions often fail to reflect the lived realities of younger users.

Several audience interventions pushed the discussion further towards the broader political economy of social media platforms.

Some participants argued that the core issue lies not primarily in children accessing technology, but in platform business models built around surveillance, engagement maximisation, and algorithmic amplification.

Others stressed that digital literacy, parental support, and education remain essential complements to regulation.

One participant compared online safety to teaching children how to cross a road: legal rules and infrastructure matter, but children also require guidance, gradual learning, and the development of judgement.

The session concluded with broad agreement that protecting minors online requires a multi-layered and rights-based approach rather than a single regulatory instrument.

Participants broadly agreed that age bans alone are unlikely to solve underlying problems linked to harmful platform design, recommendation systems, and digital business models.

The closing synthesis stressed that effective child protection requires balancing privacy, proportionality, platform accountability, harmonised regulation, digital literacy, and meaningful youth participation.

EuroDIG 2026 took place on 26 and 27 May at the Charlemagne Building of the European Commission in Brussels under the theme ‘European Voices for the Future of the Internet – Celebrating 20 Years of .eu and the Beginning of a New Internet Governance Era’.

Digital Watch Observatory followed EuroDIG 2026 through a dedicated event page, featuring session information and reporting from Brussels.

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