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The Hague and Madrid are pushing for an EU-wide minimum age for social media use, potentially extended to other online services, as the European Commission prepares to announce its own proposal next week.
The social media ban should be harmonised and enforced at European level, and extended to video games, AI chatbots and other risky digital services, the two countries said in a non-paper circulated on Friday.
Restricting minors’ access to social media has become an increasingly hot topic in the EU and beyond. France, Greece, Austria, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands are all considering or advancing national legislation to that effect.
Under pressure to head off a patchwork of national approaches, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in May that an EU proposal was coming and is now expected during her State of the Union address next week.
Ahead of that announcement, the Dutch and Spanish governments circulated a document meant to shape the upcoming proposal, stressing that “the introduction of a minimum age for social media is a measure that must necessarily be added to existing and upcoming legal frameworks.”
The two countries argue that the measure must be proportionate and respect fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, information, and data protection — and be underpinned by a comprehensive impact assessment.
In August, the French Constitutional Council struck down a national law banning social media access for under-15s, ruling the measure was too broad and insufficiently proportionate because it infringed on constitutional rights.
The Dutch-Spanish paper makes the case for tackling addictive algorithms and harmful design across all digital services through a risk-based approach, not social media alone, extending its scope to video games and AI companions.
“There should be a possibility for online providers to obtain an exemption from the age requirement if they can demonstrate that their service is sufficiently safe,” the paper reads.
For the two countries, harmonised, EU-level enforcement is essential, as national fragmentation would blunt the measure’s effectiveness. They point to the Digital Services Act, under which the Commission already acts as regulator for online services such as Google, Instagram and TikTok, as the model to replicate.
The paper also argues the upcoming proposal should be wary of leaning on parental consent as a mitigating measure, since it would be difficult to implement and would introduce additional privacy risks.
For the ban to work in practice, an age verification app is essential. Spain and the Netherlands want the upcoming legislative proposal built on the EU’s age verification framework, with the app’s function limited strictly to confirming a person is above a given age, to minimise the privacy impact.