Level 1 — Absolute Beginner
Europe wants a new law about children and the internet. The leader of the European Commission talked about it this week. Her name is Ursula von der Leyen.
The law says children under 13 cannot use social media. Social media are apps like the ones where people share photos and videos.
Children who are 13 or 14 can have a small account. A parent can watch it. They can only use it for a short time each day.
The law is also about games and chatbots. A chatbot is a computer program that talks to you. Companies must check how old a user is.
- law
- a rule made by a government that everyone must follow
- internet
- the worldwide network that connects computers and phones
- social media
- apps where people share photos, videos and messages
- account
- your personal space on an app, with your name and password
- parent
- a mother or father
- age
- how many years old a person is
- check
- to look at something carefully to see if it is correct
- chatbot
- a computer program that talks with people using words
Level 2 — Elementary
Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, used her State of the Union address in Strasbourg to announce a plan called the EU Kids Act. If it becomes law, it would ban social media for children under 13 and stop anyone from opening a full personal account before the age of 15.
Between those ages there would be a middle step. Thirteen and fourteen year olds could use supervised mini accounts with fewer features and strict limits on how long they can stay online each day.
The plan also targets design choices that keep young people scrolling. Endless feeds that never reach the bottom would be restricted. Age checks would apply not only to social apps but also to video platforms, video games and AI chatbots.
The most important change may be about proof. Today, regulators usually have to show that a service has caused harm. Under the proposal, platforms would have to demonstrate that their service is safe for minors. Companies that break the rules badly could be fined up to 6 percent of their worldwide revenue. The detailed legislation was expected the following day.
- address
- a formal speech given to an audience
- ban
- to officially forbid something
- supervised
- watched and guided by a responsible adult
- feature
- a function or capability that an app offers
- scroll
- to move content up or down a screen with your finger or mouse
- platform
- an online service where people post or watch content
- minor
- a person who is legally still a child
- revenue
- the total money a company takes in from its business
Level 3 — Intermediate
The European Commission has proposed the most far-reaching restrictions on children's online access yet attempted by a large economy. Speaking in Strasbourg, Ursula von der Leyen outlined an EU Kids Act that would prohibit social media for under-13s, withhold full personal accounts until 15, and permit only supervised mini accounts with reduced features and hard time caps for those in between.
Two elements go further than the headline age limits. The first is the treatment of design: infinite scrolling and other patterns engineered to extend engagement would be constrained directly, on the view that the mechanics of an app matter as much as its content. The second is scope. Age gating would cover video platforms, games and, notably, AI chatbots, bringing conversational systems inside child-safety regulation for the first time.
The proposal also reverses the burden of proof. Rather than requiring regulators to establish that a service has harmed young users, it would oblige platforms to demonstrate that their products are safe for minors before deploying them. Serious breaches could attract fines of up to 6 percent of global turnover, a penalty large enough to alter corporate behaviour rather than merely annoy it.
Europe is not acting alone. Australia has already introduced an under-16 social media ban, and several European states have run national experiments, some of which have collided with courts and privacy law. That last point is the obvious difficulty: verifying a user's age reliably tends to require collecting more personal data, not less. Von der Leyen framed the question as who may reach children rather than whether children may go online.
- far-reaching
- having a wide and important effect
- prohibit
- to forbid something by law
- engagement
- the amount of time and attention users give to a service
- scope
- the range of things that a rule or study covers
- burden of proof
- the duty to prove that a claim is true
- oblige
- to require somebody to do something by law or duty
- turnover
- the total value of a company's sales in a period
- verify
- to check that something is true or genuine
Level 4 — Advanced
The EU Kids Act, sketched out by Ursula von der Leyen in Strasbourg and due in detail within days, is an attempt to convert a diffuse parental anxiety into enforceable product law. Its architecture is graduated rather than absolute: a prohibition below 13, supervised mini accounts with curtailed functionality and hard time caps at 13 and 14, and full personal accounts only from 15. Graduation is politically shrewd, since a flat ban invites the objection that it treats a fourteen-year-old and a seven-year-old as the same person.
Two provisions carry more weight than the age thresholds. The first concerns design. By targeting infinite scroll and comparable retention mechanics, the Commission accepts an argument long resisted in regulatory circles, namely that the harm may reside in the architecture of an interface rather than in any particular piece of content. The second is the reversal of the burden of proof. Requiring platforms to establish that a service is safe for minors, rather than requiring officials to demonstrate that it was not, converts child safety from a matter of after-the-fact enforcement into a condition of market entry.
The inclusion of AI chatbots is the provision most likely to be studied elsewhere. Conversational systems sit awkwardly within frameworks written for feeds and comment sections: they are one-to-one, they adapt to the user, and a teenager's relationship with one is neither publishing nor private messaging in any conventional sense. Bringing them inside a child-safety regime before their consumer use matures is a deliberate act of anticipatory regulation, which is either prudent or presumptuous depending on where one sits.
The unresolved tension is between protection and privacy. Reliable age assurance is, in practice, an identity system, and identity systems collect data about everyone in order to make claims about a few. Europe has already discovered this in national experiments that ran into its own courts. Against a 27-country market and penalties of up to 6 percent of global turnover, platforms will comply; the open question is what the compliance will cost the rest of us in anonymity.
- diffuse
- spread out and not clearly focused
- graduated
- arranged in stages rather than as a single fixed rule
- shrewd
- showing sharp practical judgement
- retention
- the act of keeping users coming back to a service
- anticipatory
- done in advance of an expected development
- presumptuous
- going further than is appropriate or justified
- assurance
- a process that establishes confidence that something is true
- anonymity
- the condition of not being identified by name
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