EU proposes ban on social media for children under 13

The European Union will ban social media for children under 13 and allow only limited, supervised access until the age of 15 under plans unveiled on Wednesday by the Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, according to The Local Italy. The proposal was presented in Brussels alongside a wider push for closer cooperation with Canada on technology, defence and energy.

Von der Leyen's framing, as reported, is that Europe has the power to act — a claim about the bloc's regulatory reach rather than about enforcement capacity. The plan as described sets an age threshold and a supervised-access band, but does not yet specify how platforms would verify age or how member states would police compliance. Those questions are left to the legislative process that follows.

The announcement places Italy, like every other member state, in the position of waiting for a text it will eventually have to apply. Age verification is the practical difficulty: any system strict enough to be meaningful requires identity data that raises its own privacy questions under European law, and the Commission has not said publicly how it intends to resolve that tension.