Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, unveiled a plan to keep children younger than 13 off platforms such as Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, while the same Brussels machine talks up Europe’s place in the AI race and hands more power to platforms, parents, and regulators. The proposal would also tighten rules for social media accounts, video streaming services, online video games and chatbots aimed at users under 18, with fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue for companies that don’t comply.
Brussels Draws New Digital Fences
Von der Leyen said, "What we already have is a consensus that there needs to be a start date for the age children can join social media," and called for "age-appropriate restrictions." At a press conference, she said, "Today, our children are interacting with some of the most sophisticated technologies ever created, and they were not designed with their well-being and development in mind." She added that the proposed reform to the EU Kids Act "will establish clear boundaries in the digital world, just as we do every day in the real world."
That language does the usual Brussels trick: turning a political decision into a moral boundary, as if the Commission were merely drawing neat lines instead of extending its reach deeper into everyday life. The measure follows similar proposals in Australia, the United Kingdom, China, India, Turkey and several European countries, and it responds to growing concerns about the impact social media can have on children's mental health. The proposal would give parents greater control over the accounts of young people aged 13 to 15, while the European Parliament wants platforms to implement child-safe designs and algorithms and provide easy-to-use parental controls.
The draft rules would ban features considered addictive, including infinite scrolling and autoplay content. They would also restrict algorithm-driven recommendations, personalized profiling, reward-based engagement mechanisms and unsolicited contact from strangers. Major technology companies would have to strengthen age-verification systems for anyone seeking to open an account, and they would be required to dedicate greater resources to content supervision and moderation. The state’s answer to platform power is, once again, more supervision, more verification, more control. Different logo, same logic.
The AI Race, With Rules Attached
In the same broader European debate over digital policy, von der Leyen said Europe would help write the rules for artificial intelligence, presenting the bloc as a rule-setter on a par with Washington and Beijing. She said the EU would seek to work with allies including Canada, the United Kingdom and others on model evaluation, verification, early warning, AI security and more. Plans for talks in November with industry leaders, entrepreneurs and government officials were also mentioned, with AI implementation in health, transport, agri-food, advanced manufacturing and defence and space on the agenda.
That’s the familiar EU pitch: competition dressed up as governance, corporate power wrapped in the language of public interest. The Commission wants Europe to shape the AI race, even though sceptics in the European Parliament noted that most of the world’s leading AI developers are based outside Europe. Michael McNamara, an independent Irish MEP from the Renew group and co-chair of the European Parliament's working group on the implementation and enforcement of the AI Act, said von der Leyen's pledge was little more than "lip-service" at the moment. He said, "Many of the most significant AI developers are outside of Europe, and will have little regard whatsoever to her comments."
McNamara pointed to what he called a wildly inconsistent record from von der Leyen's Commission on AI safety. He said it championed the AI Act and an AI Liability Directive in the last mandate, then withdrew the liability proposal in this one. He said the Commission later pushed to strip safeguards and pressured the Council and Parliament to carve entire sectors out of the AI Act during the recent Omnibus trilogues, only to reverse course again in the State of the European Union speech. He said, "Given the contradictory positions she has advanced in quick step, it’s hard to expect AI developers to pay much regard to her latest position." Even so, he agreed with von der Leyen's pledge to work with "like-minded partners like Canada, the United Kingdom and others, particularly on model evaluation, verification and security."
Who Gets to Build the Future
Italian MEP Brando Benifei, who also co-chairs Parliament's AI working group and was co-rapporteur of the AI Act, praised von der Leyen, saying she is right to claim "the AI Act positions Europe to lead on AI safety." He said, "It binds every frontier model offered here, American or Chinese. Allied cooperation with Canada and the UK on safety is a welcome step that must be backed by sovereign capacity: European cloud, chips, unified capital, and a public CERN for AI to turn regulatory leadership into technological power."
That’s the other side of the same project: not just regulation, but industrial strategy, capital concentration and state-backed technological power. The words change. The hierarchy doesn’t. The Commission wants to police children’s access to platforms, discipline companies with fines, coordinate with allies on AI security, and then funnel the whole thing through talks with industry leaders, entrepreneurs and government officials. The public gets age checks, parental controls and promises about safety. The corporations get a managed market. The state gets more reach.
Von der Leyen also promised to table a "Quality Jobs Act" by the end of 2026, to "help develop skills, improve the quality of jobs and give workers a fair chance." It sits in the same speech as the AI push and the social media restrictions: a neat package of control, labour discipline and digital governance, all issued from the top, all presented as common sense.