Horizon Scan: Children's Online Safety and Privacy (EU and Beyond)

The European Commission is expected to outline its proposal on minors' access to social media this week, building on recommendations from its Special Panel on child safety online and pressure from Member States. The proposal may be integrated into the Digital Fairness Act, scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026, which is expected to address personalized advertising directed at minors, influencer marketing, age assurance measures, default safety and privacy settings for children, and platform design features contributing to excessive or compulsive use. If minors' access restrictions are folded into a consumer-protection law, enforcement will likely fall to consumer protection authorities working alongside Digital Services Coordinators under the existing Digital Services Act.

Broad age-gating measures that restrict compliant minors from accessing entire platforms do not address the underlying harms of grooming, sextortion, or abuse that occur in direct messages and private channels, and risk displacing both vulnerable children and offenders to less-regulated services where no oversight exists at all. Guardii offers an alternative mechanism: rather than verifying every user's age at the point of entry, its AI-driven detection modules monitor the substance and escalation of conversations in real time, identifying patterns consistent with grooming, sextortion, coercion and other harms as they develop, and blocking hostile contact before it reaches the child or escalates to a crisis. This targeted approach addresses the actual risk without imposing the privacy burden of universal identity verification or denying access to children who could benefit from supervised, safe online participation.