Horizon Scan: Children's Online Safety and Privacy (EU and Beyond)
Guardii Analysis
The European Commission is preparing a legislative proposal on minors' access to social media, responding to recommendations from its Special Panel that social media providers should restrict access to children under 13 unless services are safe by design, with Member States empowered to extend precautionary restrictions to older adolescents. President von der Leyen confirmed details would be announced in her September 16, 2026 State of the Union address, and Denmark launched a public consultation on September 7, 2026 proposing a minimum age of 15 for social media platforms with enforcement beginning July 1, 2027.
Age-restricted access provisions constrain use for compliant populations while offering no mechanism to identify harm in progress: a 14-year-old prohibited from holding a verified Instagram account may migrate to unmoderated platforms or encrypted channels, displacing rather than preventing exploitation. In place of blanket access bans that impose identity-verification burdens on every user, behavioral threat detection operating inside direct messages intercepts coercion, escalation and sustained targeting regardless of the declared age of the account, surfacing the child at risk to a parent or authority without requiring platforms to collect biometric or government-issued identity data from all adults and adolescents who wish to communicate online.