When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented the EU Kids Act on 17 September, she framed it as a necessary step to give children a safer internet. The proposal introduces graduated age thresholds for social media access, bans addictive design elements such as infinite scroll for under-18s, and requires platforms to verify age using a privacy-preserving “yes/no” token rather than a birth-certificate check.
Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen described the approach as a delay, not a ban. Children would be gradually introduced to risky platforms at ages 13, 15 and 18, rather than being locked out entirely. But that framing has drawn sharp criticism from digital rights advocates who argue that age is the wrong lens through which to view online safety.
“The way the proposal is framed is that age is the problem,” says Simeon de Brouwer, policy advisor at European Digital Rights (EDRi), a Brussels-based network of digital rights NGOs. He contends that by delaying access rather than fixing the underlying design, “the Commission does not address the causes of the harm, the business model and the addictive design, the manipulative practices, which young people will be exposed to as soon as they reach the different thresholds.”
Age as a proxy for vulnerability
De Brouwer's core objection is that the Act treats age as the only marker of vulnerability worth legislating for. “The sole factor of vulnerability that is taken into consideration is young age, not even age. But there are many other factors,” he says. EDRi represents member organisations working across civil society, and according to de Brouwer, the organisation tries “to take into account marginalised groups whose voice we don't hear that much in Brussels.”
That matters because age verification requires everyone, not just children, to prove they are old enough to pass through the gate. “If we really need to know who's underage to protect them better, that means we know everybody's age, or we need everybody's age,” de Brouwer continues. “We are turning smartphones and identity documents into prerequisites for accessing online spaces and exercising fundamental rights.” He lists who gets caught in that net: “people who don't have state identities, people who are stateless, people from migration backgrounds and not integrated yet, people who by choice don't have a smartphone.”
The same restrictions risk harming some of the young people the Act is meant to protect, including those with disabilities who rely on the internet to socialise. De Brouwer points to “young people who also are marginalised, so people who are handicapped and don't have that many physical interactions, people who are in rural spaces and don't have friends around, people whose parents are not very present or willing to support them and therefore need online spaces to find, to talk to, to find people like them.” He concludes that “the range of young people who will lose out is immense.”
Francesca Pisanu, senior policy officer at Eurochild, a network focused on children's rights, broadly welcomes the Act's ambition but agrees the accessibility question deserves scrutiny. “It is known that social media platforms or the online world in general is a space where children, or people in general, can be included in society. They can find people with shared identities succeed. They can also see more diversity,” she says. She adds a caveat: “people that are discriminating [in] the offline world are also likely to be discriminated [against] in the online world,” so it's important that “all these inclusive features” are “activated at the same time as the protective features,” so the two do “not contradict” each other.
Pisanu pointed to a Eurochild-linked study in the Netherlands that found that “children with disabilities or the children with mental health issues were the ones that were actually in favour of a ban,” a reminder that marginalised groups do not speak with one voice on this question.
Overlapping and overriding other Acts
For de Brouwer, the deeper problem is political timing. He argued the Kids Act risks overriding the Digital Fairness Act (DFA), a parallel initiative meant to strengthen consumer protection “everywhere, regardless of which service you use”, not just for children. “The risk is that we lose out by focusing so much on children and young people. We lose the political momentum that we had to improve everyone's protection through the DFA,” he said, warning it could now arrive “in a diluted fashion.”
He was equally clear that many of the Act's protections should not be limited to minors. “Who doesn't want to be protected from AI companions designed to be addictive and to entice you to keep coming back?” he asked, arguing that platforms should instead be “forced to be non-addictive” and that “we should have, for example, a right to services which are not personalised.”
Pisanu's institutional position is less confrontational: Eurochild wants safety-by-design to be binding law, not just DSA guidelines, and welcomes that some protections, like recommender-system defaults, would extend even to unregistered users, since some of these “safety features would apply also to those that are not registered.” But both interviewees converge on one point: the current draft answers “how do we protect children” without fully answering “how do we protect anyone who is vulnerable but not underage.”
As the EU moves forward with the Kids Act proposal, the debate highlights a broader tension between protecting young users and ensuring that online spaces remain accessible and safe for all Europeans. The Commission's focus on age may be politically appealing, but as critics note, it risks leaving behind those who are most in need of protection.
