What the Commission adopted
The European Commission adopted its EU Kids Act proposal on 17 September, setting a bloc-wide age ladder for social-media access. The Commission says children under 13 would not be allowed to use social media, while users aged 13 and 14 could use only parent-created and parent-supervised mini accounts. Personal accounts would begin at 15, and services would have to apply mandatory safe-design protections to all accounts belonging to people under 18.
The Commission also says the proposal reverses the burden of proof on child safety: platforms would have to demonstrate that their services are safe for children rather than leaving users or regulators to establish harm after the fact. A separate Digital Fairness Act is planned for the autumn to address addictive design more broadly.
Scope extends beyond ordinary social feeds
Reuters reports that the package also creates obligations for video-sharing services, online video games and AI chatbots that serve users below 18. That makes the proposal broader than a conventional social-network age gate and places conversational AI and game platforms inside the same child-safety policy direction.
The immediate practical effect is limited because the Commission has adopted a legislative proposal rather than a final EU law. The European Parliament and the Council still have to consider the text, and the details can change during that process. The age thresholds and design duties therefore describe the Commission position that will enter negotiations, not rules that platforms must enforce today.
Age assurance becomes part of the implementation problem
Enforcing different account permissions at 13, 15 and 18 requires services to determine age with more reliability than a self-entered birth date. The Commission said in April that its European age-verification app was ready for deployment and could let users prove age using a passport or identity card while keeping the proof anonymous. It also described the software as free, device-independent and open source, with some member states planning to integrate it into national digital-identity wallets.
The Kids Act proposal therefore sits alongside an emerging EU age-assurance layer rather than relying only on platform-specific checks. The legal text and later technical rules will determine whether that Commission tool, national identity wallets or other compliant methods become the normal route for proving age.
What remains unsettled
The proposal does not yet settle how parental mini accounts will work across different categories of service, how safe-design duties will be measured, or what evidence platforms must provide to satisfy the reversed burden of proof. Those details matter for privacy, interoperability and enforcement, particularly where age verification itself can create new data-collection risks.
The confirmed development is institutional: the Commission has moved from signalling possible age limits to adopting a concrete legislative proposal with defined age bands and platform obligations. The final scope, compliance timetable and enforcement architecture remain subject to the EU legislative process.