In mid-July, the expert panel that Ursula von der Leyen convened on children's safety online delivered its verdict: bar under-13s from social media until platforms can prove their products are safe by design. The Commission President called the evidence “the most convincing” she had seen and promised proposals after the summer recess. Three weeks on, that timeline is holding — a legal proposal is expected within weeks, and it will land in an EU that has spent the year edging toward action.
The practical obstacle to any age limit has always been verification: how do you confirm a child's age without harvesting everyone's identity documents? Brussels' answer is a dedicated age-verification app, unveiled in April 2026 and now being piloted in five countries — Denmark, France, Spain, Greece and Italy. It uses “zero-knowledge proofs,” which confirm a user is over a given age without revealing anything else, and the plan is to fold it into the EU digital identity wallet (eID) due at the end of 2026. If it works, it strips platforms of the technical excuse they have leaned on.
Where governments diverge is the age itself. Denmark, which holds the rotating EU Council presidency for the second half of 2026 and has made child safety a priority, wants a hard ban under 13 and parental consent for 13- to 15-year-olds. Spain has pushed a limit of 16. The European Parliament said in late 2025 that children should be at least 16 to use social media. That spread — 13, 15, 16 — is the crux of the coming fight: a low EU-wide floor that lets member states go higher is the likeliest compromise, but it satisfies no one completely.
Europe has quietly shifted from debating whether to restrict children's access to social media to arguing about how. The building blocks — an expert mandate, a verification tool, a supportive Council presidency and a Commission president who has staked her name on it — are now in place, which is why a proposal this autumn looks less like a gesture and more like the start of real law. The open questions are the hard ones: what age, how strictly enforced, and how platforms will fight a model that puts the burden of proof on them. But the direction is set. The era of the self-declared birthday on a sign-up form is ending in Europe.
