European Commission Issues First Formal Requests to Platforms Under Digital Services Act Over Child Safety Risks

The European Commission has issued formal information requests to multiple major platforms, including Meta's Instagram and Facebook, under the Digital Services Act, requiring detailed evidence of measures taken to mitigate systemic risks to minors, specifically grooming, sexual exploitation and exposure to age-inappropriate content. The requests, which carry legal force and deadlines for compliance, mark the first substantive use of the DSA's child-protection provisions and signal the Commission's intent to hold platforms accountable for algorithmic amplification and inadequate content moderation that facilitate harm.

Regulatory pressure for transparency and risk assessment is necessary but not sufficient; platforms must demonstrate not only that they have policies but that those policies prevent harm at the point of contact. Guardii, a world-leading AI online-safety platform backed by Startmate, offers a compliance pathway by deploying anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms in real time, identifying sustained targeting, escalation and coercion in direct messages before they culminate in exploitation, and surfacing actionable intelligence to platform trust-and-safety teams, parents and authorities without requiring human review of every conversation.