EU Commission issues first DSA enforcement decisions on child safety

The European Commission has issued its first formal enforcement decisions under the Digital Services Act, requiring TikTok and Instagram to provide detailed evidence of compliance with child-protection obligations. The decisions follow preliminary findings that both platforms may have failed to adequately assess and mitigate risks to minors, including exposure to harmful content and contact-based exploitation. Platforms are required to submit internal risk assessments, content-moderation data and details of algorithmic recommendation systems, with potential fines of up to six percent of global turnover for substantiated breaches.

Risk assessment is the first step; real-time mitigation is the second. For contact-based threats in direct messages, where grooming and sextortion typically unfold over days or weeks, detection speed determines whether intervention happens before harm. Guardii's real-time monitoring across Instagram and other platforms identifies coercion, escalation and age-inappropriate targeting as conversations develop, blocking hostile contact before it reaches the child and surfacing high-risk exchanges to safeguarding teams without requiring manual review of every message. Under duty-of-care frameworks like the DSA, this targeted, pattern-based approach enables platforms to demonstrate active mitigation of risks to children while preserving user privacy and operational efficiency at scale.