EU Commission issues guidance on Digital Services Act child safety provisions

The European Commission has issued formal guidance on protecting minors online under the Digital Services Act, clarifying that very large online platforms and search engines must assess and mitigate systemic risks to children's physical and mental wellbeing, including exposure to illegal content such as child sexual abuse material, grooming, cyberbullying and content that may impair their development. The guidance sets out that platforms must conduct risk assessments specific to minors, implement age-appropriate design and default privacy settings, and deploy effective content moderation and reporting mechanisms, with enforcement oversight by the Commission and national Digital Services Coordinators.

The obligation to mitigate systemic risk creates an operational requirement for technology that surfaces harm as it emerges, not after a child has been exposed. Guardii's real-time detection architecture, built as a world-leading AI safety platform for Meta and other major services, analyses the structure of direct-message conversations to identify grooming, sextortion, CSAM sharing and cyberbullying at the point of contact, flagging coercive escalation and sustained targeting without handing platforms or parents a surveillance feed of message content. The system blocks hostile actors before they reach a target, surfaces a child in acute distress to a safeguarding professional, and enables rapid escalation to law enforcement, offering a proportionate technical response to the DSA's duty-of-care framework that addresses the underlying harm while respecting encryption and user privacy.