Social media companies that design their platforms to hook children are about to face their toughest regulatory challenge yet in Europe.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced Tuesday that the bloc will target "addictive and harmful design practices" from TikTok, Meta, and X under a new Digital Fairness Act (DFA) expected by the end of 2026. Speaking at the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children in Copenhagen, she called out specific features by name: endless scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications.
"Sleep deprivation, depression, anxiety, self-harm, addictive behaviour, cyberbullying, grooming, exploitation, suicide. Risks are multiplying fast," von der Leyen said, according to Reuters.
"They are the result of business models that treat our children's attention as a commodity." The DFA will ban manipulative practices, addictive features, and misleading influencer marketing on digital platforms. It will also impose strict limits on how social media companies use AI, von der Leyen said. The regulation strengthens and expands the existing Digital Services Act (DSA), under which the Commission is already investigating TikTok, X, and Meta's Instagram and Facebook.
"We are taking action against TikTok and its addictive design," von der Leyen said. "The same applies to Meta, because we believe Instagram and Facebook are failing to enforce their own minimum age of 13." The Commission has also started proceedings against X over its Grok AI tool, which has been used to generate sexual images of women and children.
Von der Leyen did not stop at new rules. She announced the EU's executive arm has developed its own age verification app with what she called the "highest privacy standards in the world." Member states will be able to integrate it into digital wallets, and online platforms can enforce it directly.
"No more excuses, the technology for age-verification is available," she said, per CNBC. A legal proposal could be ready as soon as this summer, with the Commission awaiting findings from its Special Panel of Experts on Child Safety Online. Von der Leyen also advocated for a minimum age for social media platform access, potentially arriving this summer.
"The question is not whether young people should have access to social media," she said. " The crackdown is part of a broader hardening of attitudes across Europe. Nations including Norway, France, Turkey, and Britain are debating or rolling out their own legislation to ban or limit teenage social media use. On the same day as von der Leyen's speech, Europe's top court sided with Italy's telecoms watchdog in a case requiring Meta to compensate publishers for using snippets of their articles.
