A landmark social media addiction trial in California on Wednesday found Meta and YouTube negligent for designing addictive social media platforms that harmed a child, ordering them to pay $3 million in compensatory damages.
In its probe into Snapchat, the EU could fine Snap, the parent company, up to 6 percent of its annual global revenue if it’s found to have breached the digital rules.
Snap didn’t respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.
The Commission said it will pursue multiple angles of investigation including whether the platform does enough to assess the age of its users, which Snap does through self-declaration. In separate findings announced Thursday, the Commission said self-declaration by four porn platforms — asking users to tick a box to declare their age — is insufficient to protect kids.
Snap’s age verification system for figuring out if minors under 13 years old are on the platform may be one of the “weakest on the market,” a senior Commission official said. The risk on Snap with regards to age verification is two-sided, the official said: children are posing as adults, and adults also pose as children to approach minors.
The Commission is also looking into whether Snapchat is doing enough to protect kids from “being contacted by users with harmful intent, such as sexual exploitation or recruitment for criminal activities.” This grooming includes the risk of radicalization, said another senior official.