EU Moves to Bar Social Media for Under-13s, and the Districts Ask Who Enforces It

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 European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, according to The Local Italy. The measure is pitched as a bloc-wide protection, framed by von der Leyen in the phrase the outlet carried: Europe has the power to act.

The proposal is the second front opened by Brussels this month on the question of who may cross which threshold. It arrives as nine EU states, Italy among them, have again delayed the entry-exit system at their external borders, and as the Commission weighs a revision of Schengen short-stay visa rules — a cluster of measures, reported separately by The Guardian and The Local Italy, that together redraw the line between open movement and supervised access.

For the Marche, the practical question is not the age limit but the enforcement. In the region's inland comuni, where the population is ageing and the young leave for university and work, the after-school hours are often spent in a household with one parent working shifts in a shoe or furniture district. A parental-consent regime assumes a parent in the room; the districts have long assumed the grandmother, the neighbour or the empty kitchen.