EU Moves to Ban Social Media for Children Under 13

The European Union will ban social media for children under 13 and permit only limited, supervised access until the age of 15, under plans unveiled on Wednesday by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. The Local Italy reported the announcement, quoting von der Leyen's line that "Europe has power to act" — a deliberate echo of the bloc's recent willingness to regulate digital platforms directly rather than leave the matter to member states.

The proposal would set a common floor across the 27 member states, replacing a patchwork in which some countries enforce age verification loosely and others not at all. The Local's report describes the measure as covering under-13s with a full ban and 13-to-15-year-olds with restricted, supervised access. It does not detail the verification mechanism, the penalties for platforms, or the legislative timetable, and those elements should be treated as unsettled until the Commission publishes the full text.

The announcement places the EU ahead of most national governments on the question of minors and social platforms, and it follows a period in which several member states, including Italy, have debated their own restrictions. The Commission's framing — that the bloc has both the competence and the will to legislate — signals that it intends the measure to be European rather than national in scope.

The proposal lands in a European policy environment already shaped by the Digital Services Act, which gave the Commission direct enforcement powers over very large online platforms. The age-limit plan would extend that regulatory posture from content moderation into access itself. The Local Italy's report does not say whether the measure would operate through the DSA framework or through new legislation, and it does not indicate when the European Parliament and member states would begin considering it.

For Italy, the practical questions are the ones the announcement leaves open. Age verification at scale would require either platform-side identity checks or device-level controls, both of which raise data-protection issues under the GDPR. Schools, which in Italy already run digital-citizenship programmes, would be among the first institutions asked to interpret the new rules. None of these implementation details appear in the coverage; the report is confined to the political announcement and von der Leyen's stated rationale.

Seen from Italy's eastern edge, the proposal is another instance of Brussels setting a standard that member states then adapt, a pattern familiar in this region from Schengen and from the entry-exit system. Friuli-Venezia Giulia's schools and families would be governed by the same rule as those in Lombardy or Sicily, with no regional variation contemplated in the reporting. The Local Italy does not mention the region, and no local reaction can be attributed to it from the available sources.

The measure also sits alongside the Commission's parallel work on Schengen visa rules and on border checks, all of which point to a bloc asserting a common regulatory line in areas where national approaches had diverged. Whether the social-media ban advances as proposed, and on what timetable, is not established by the reporting. What is established is that the Commission has now put the question of children's access to platforms on the European legislative agenda under its own name.