Song Jinbo/Wen The news that the EU will ban minors from using social media has caused a stir in public opinion recently. This is because von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, will deliver an annual "Union Message" to the European Parliament in September this year, among which the most striking issue is the implementation of restrictions on the use of social media by minors within the EU.

The public opinion quickly simplified it as' the EU will ban minors from using social media ', and this labeling interpretation obscured the true legal implications and far-reaching impact of the policy.

From the official discourse of the European Commission and the evolution trajectory of EU digital services law, this policy is by no means a "one size fits all" ban on accounts. In May 2026, at the "European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children" in Copenhagen, von der Leyen deliberately selected the concept of "social media delay" - it is not a permanent deprivation of children's digital rights, but a delay in the time point when minors are exposed to a highly commercialized, algorithm driven digital environment, leaving a buffer period for children's brain development and digital literacy training. EU Justice Commissioner McGrath further clarified that the EU tends to adopt a "gradual approach", and the core goal of regulatory agencies is to change the "predetermined mechanism" of platform interaction with minors, rather than depriving children of their own online participation rights.

This is the key entry point to understanding the direction of EU policy: its focus is on the underlying profit logic of large technology companies.

The age restrictions on the use of social media by minors worldwide are extremely fragmented, reflecting cultural differences in understanding children's autonomy.

However, restricting account registration alone cannot prevent minors from browsing public content through web pages or anonymous means. The true core of EU policy is extending from simply "verifying user age" to "holding platform design accountable".

One of the most controversial topics in current global policy debates is the age at which minors are considered to have sufficient mental capacity to independently cope with the systemic risks of social media.

Brain development is a continuous, individualized, and multidimensional process, and there is no absolute "safe" age threshold in medicine. However, adolescence is a highly sensitive period for brain development, and the American Psychological Association points out that neurobiological fragility makes adolescents more susceptible to manipulation by reward mechanisms such as social media likes and shares compared to adults. Further research has revealed that girls aged 11 to 13 and boys aged 14 to 15 have the most significant predictive indicators of decreased life satisfaction after using social media, and adolescents who use it for more than 3 hours a day face a doubled risk of anxiety and depression symptoms. Implementing stricter platform preset protection measures for the age group of 13 to 15 has a solid rationale in neuroscience and public health.

Three months after the implementation of the 16-year-old social media ban in Australia, up to 85% of teenagers under the age of 16 continue to use banned social media platforms. Most teenagers maintain their active status by using false age, borrowing accounts, or bypassing imperfect verification mechanisms. This exposes the ineffectiveness of policies that rely solely on front-end blocking.

Faced with widespread evasion behavior, the Australian government is not punishing children or their parents who bypass the system. Instead, it is doubling the maximum penalty for violations on social media platforms to AUD 99 million and giving regulatory agencies stronger investigative powers, attempting to force platforms to upgrade their interception and identification technologies through sky high fines. This establishes an important principle: system vulnerabilities are the responsibility of the platform, not the user. Australia's approach provides a key experiential reference for the European Union.

Who should bear the legal responsibility if minors successfully bypass the age limit? In the context of internet governance in the past, responsibility was often easily shifted to parents or children themselves. But under the new legal framework of the European Union and the world, the responsible parties are undergoing a fundamental shift.

The EU has set "protecting minors" as an obligation that super large online platforms and super large online search engines must voluntarily undertake. If a 14-year-old child secretly registers on TikTok or Instagram, EU law tends to recognize it as an illegal failure of platform product design, risk mitigation mechanisms, and age verification systems, rather than a single responsibility of family supervision.

Von der Leyen once said frankly: "We do not expect children to design their own safety belts, nor do we expect parents to install their own airbags at home. The same product safety principles must apply to social media. Technology providers are responsible for ensuring the safety and safe use of their products."

Based on this logic, the European Commission has launched intensive enforcement actions between 2025 and 2026. Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and other platforms are facing EU investigations due to excessive reliance on invalid age self declarations, failure to protect minors from online abduction, default activation of push notifications and "find friends" functions, and other reasons. The EU's strategy is to threaten huge fines of up to 6% of the company's global annual revenue, forcing platforms to assume absolute legal responsibility as "digital gatekeepers".

Observing the trajectory of digital legislation in the European Union over the past decade, we can also glimpse a potential strategic intention: the EU has always attempted to regain its rule making power in the global digital economy.

Antitrust investigations and data privacy regulations targeting enterprises often face extremely cumbersome legal procedures, difficulty in providing evidence, and often encounter strong political lobbying from multinational corporations. In contrast, "protecting children from online harm" is an almost impeccable high ground in politics and morality. EU regulatory agencies can now legally require tech giants to open up algorithmic black boxes, mandate independent audits, modify underlying interface designs, and even completely change their profit models by prohibiting behavior tracking advertisements and personalized data collection targeting minors.

In this context, policies restricting minors from using social media have become a new pivot for Europe to regain its "digital sovereignty" in a sense. This is not only a social welfare and public health policy, but also a geopolitical game that can weaken the influence of multinational technology oligopolies, reshape the European digital economic order, and export the Brussels effect to the world.

For Chinese regulatory agencies, the issues facing the protection of minors on social media have both similarities with Europe and the United States, as well as particularities based on national conditions.

The commonality lies in the fact that the phenomenon of minors addicted to short videos and social platforms is equally prominent in China, parental anxiety is also widespread, and the addictive design of platform algorithms has also been widely criticized. China has introduced a series of restrictive measures such as the "youth model", but in actual implementation, it also faces technical difficulties in age verification. The regulatory logic of the EU, which focuses on "safety preset" and "age appropriate design" and locks the responsibility subject on the platform rather than parents or children, is deeply in line with the spirit of China's "Law on the Protection of Minors" which adds a special chapter on online protection.

The difference is equally significant: China's network governance framework endows the government with stronger direct regulatory capabilities. In addition, the relative independence of China's Internet ecology means that the transmission path and impact of the "Brussels Effect" in China will be different from other markets.

But one thing is clear: for Chinese technology companies committed to "going global", whether it is short video applications, e-commerce platforms, or social games, the EU's policy trend cannot be ignored. Studying the EU's age verification technical standards in advance, participating in relevant international rule discussions, and reserving compliance flexibility in the technical architecture are no longer precautionary measures, but urgent.

(The author is a columnist)