"No social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15." Ursula von der Leyen delivered the two sentences that will define the Kids Act in her State of the Union on Wednesday, and the Commission presents the legal text in Strasbourg on Thursday morning. The backronym is "Keeping Internet Digital Spaces Accountable and Trustworthy". The substance is the first bloc-wide minimum age for social media.
Von der Leyen promised the law a year ago. It has arrived as a graduated system rather than a single ban, and with a reach that goes well beyond the platforms most parents have in mind.
The draft that circulated before the speech sets out three age bands. Children under 13 are kept off mainstream social media altogether; the working text allows tailored services for the 3-to-13 group only under full parental supervision. From 13 to 14, children can hold accounts with limited features, provided a parent or guardian approves, with screen-time limits and parental controls attached. Independent use begins at 15.
The scope is the second surprise. The rules apply to video-sharing platforms, online games, app stores, AI companions and AI chatbots, not only to social networks. Age verification would rely on EU-approved methods for all users, which is the mechanism that makes the age bands enforceable and also the one that raises the loudest privacy objections. Fines run to 6 per cent of annual global sales, the same ceiling as the Digital Services Act.
The legal design flips the usual burden. "Platforms will have to prove that they are safe," the speech said. Von der Leyen's own framing was blunter: children are "pulled deeper and deeper into feeds designed for endless scrolling", and "what is too much is too much". Her summary line, "we set our rules, not Big Tech", was written for a specific audience across the Atlantic.
Australia moved first, with an under-16 ban that has produced mixed results and, crucially, no mandated verification technology. The Commission has chosen a lower threshold and a tiered structure, and it is prescribing the verification layer. That makes the EU version harder to evade and harder to implement. Eleventh-hour negotiations inside the Commission were still under way on Tuesday over exactly where the lines fall, so the text presented today may differ in detail from the drafts.
The Digital Services Act regulates how platforms behave. The Kids Act regulates who may use them. That is a different order of intervention, and it lands in a different political climate. The US administration has treated EU digital rules as a trade grievance since the 2025 tariff deal, and a law that keeps European teenagers off American platforms will be read in Washington as exactly the kind of measure von der Leyen was warned about. She did not name the United States in her speech. She did not need to.
The Council presidency adds an awkward wrinkle. Ireland holds the chair until the end of the year, and Ireland's economy is unusually exposed to the companies the act targets. By the time the file reaches serious negotiation among ministers, the presidency will have passed to Lithuania, which changes the room.
This is the most enforceable child-safety rule any major jurisdiction has proposed, and the most intrusive, because the age-verification layer it depends on touches every adult user too. The fight in Parliament and Council will not be about whether 13 is the right age. It will be about who verifies, with what data, and whether the EU is prepared to hold the line when the first US retaliation threat arrives. Von der Leyen has staked the credibility of "we set our rules" on a law aimed at children. The test of it will be fought over adults.
