EU-wide social media ban for children to be announced in September
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen (pictured), is said to want to announce plans after the summer holidays that would ban social media from the lives of all children across Europe.
She is expected to announce this intention during her annual State of the Union.
Euractiv, a political news site, has managed to break this story based on information from directly involved officials. A special committee is looking into whether Von der Leyen can actually make that claim on 16 September.
Exactly what the legal framework would look like and up to what age social media would be off-limits is not yet clear. The various EU member states have different ideas about this.
England does not, but then it is no longer a member of the EU. On the other side of the North Sea, a ban for all children up to the age of 16 will come into force at the beginning of next year. In a year’s time, no English child will have access to Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, gaming sites and X. Children up to the age of 18 will be subject to the same ban, but they will be able to deactivate it.
A common criticism of such bans is that they always require a government filter between the user and digital services. According to civil rights organisations, a government deciding who may and may not see what is a first step onto a slippery slope.
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