The proposal, published on 17th September, seeks to protect minors from risky digital services and AI systems, and ensure online services for kids are safe by design. It introduces a gradual uptake of social media for children across the EU.
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The proposal recognises the risks that minors face on certain online social networking services and video-sharing platforms, and therefore limits autonomous account creation on those specific platforms and systems by children below the age of 15 years. By providing one age across the European Union, it proposes to harmonise diverging national rules removing obstacles to the implementation of the Digital Single Market, ensuring legal certainty and a similar level of protection for all children in the European Union.
It contains a number of legislative articles which go in the right direction. COFACE has been advocating for years for a deep dive into online business models to address the root causes of online challenges. This legislation would require tech platforms to change how their products work, addressing features like infinite scrolling and other addictive-design techniques, notifications designed to keep children coming back, unsafe recommendations and “rabbit holes”, unsolicited messages from strangers; public exposure of children’s content, inappropriate spending mechanisms, and potentially harmful AI chatbots/companions.
Article 6 includes the delayed creation and use of accounts on online social networking services and of video-sharing platform services for children under 15 years where the service poses a risk to the privacy, safety or security of a minor below that age. However, providers of online social networking services and video-sharing platform services may allow guardians to set up accounts for minors above the age of 13 years and below the age of 15 years with limited features. At COFACE, we will be monitoring how to ensure that the rights of every child, regardless of their family environment, are protected and respected. Families are diverse and not every parent or caregiver has the same time, resources and knowledge.
Additionally, some of the articles in the proposals are aimed explicitly at tackling online grooming (and thereby contributing to preventing child sexual abuse online), namely Article 12 which has specific measures aimed at online social networking services and video-sharing platform services, which would be obliged to put measures in place that ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security of minors as regards contacts between minors and other recipients of the service.
Finally, the Communication accompanying this legislative proposal refers to the role of parents and guardians, namely that the key responsibility for designing safe online spaces should rest with digital-service providers, rather than “unduly shifting responsibility” onto parents.
The European Parliament and the Council of the EU will examine and react to this proposal over the coming months.
