Aarhus: The European Commission adopted the KIDS Act on 17 September 2026, proposing to keep children under 13 off social media entirely, to give 13 to 15 year olds only parent-created accounts, and to set 15 as the age at which a minor may open an account alone.
Denmark’s government has pressed for a national age limit of its own for the better part of a year, and Danish classrooms have carried that argument in public longer than most. Brussels has now answered with a Union-wide version, which turns a national debate into a negotiation among twenty-seven governments.
The proposal’s sharpest move is procedural rather than numerical. The KIDS Act reverses the burden of proof, so a provider must demonstrate that its service is age-appropriate and safe by design instead of a regulator proving harm after the damage is done. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the change “reversing the burden of proof” when she presented it.
The scope stretches well past the obvious platforms. Social networking services, video-sharing platforms, app stores, online games, operating systems and, notably, AI companions and chatbots all sit inside the text. That last category matters, because conversational systems marketed to teenagers occupy a gap that neither the Digital Services Act nor national media law fills cleanly.
For the 13 to 15 band the Commission proposes a supervised mini-account with limited functionality and a one-hour daily cap, created and controlled by a parent. It splits the difference between an outright ban and the status quo, and it will satisfy neither the campaigners who wanted 16 nor the platforms that wanted nothing.
Everything then depends on age assurance working without turning the open web into an identity checkpoint. Platforms must establish age while collecting no more personal data than the task requires, and data protection authorities will read the final text with that tension in mind. The Commission published the proposal and its supporting documents on the same day.
The file now enters the ordinary legislative procedure, where the European Parliament and the Council each write a position before negotiating a joint text. France, Spain and Denmark have already legislated or announced minimum ages of their own, which gives the KIDS Act political momentum and, at the same time, several competing ideas about what the right rule looks like.
Industry will argue that the Digital Services Act already obliges platforms to protect minors and that a second instrument duplicates enforcement. Child-safety groups will answer that four years of guidelines produced little, and that a hard age floor is the only rule a fourteen year old cannot negotiate around. Both readings carry evidence.
Expect the fight to run on definitions. What counts as a social networking service, when an AI companion becomes a covered service, and how a company proves safe design in practice are the questions that will consume the next two years of drafting. The ages in the headline are the easy part, and they are the part most likely to survive intact.
