Child safety has become the preferred argument to crack down on tech. No politician wants to oppose it. No company wants to look complacent about it. No parent thinks children are safe on the Internet. The old patience with digital platforms is gone.
Several days ago, the G7 put the same concern into diplomatic language, agreeing on common principles that push platforms toward safer design, age checks, and stronger protections for children online.
While European regulators push ahead strict laws and the US prioritizes a business-first approach, both agree that children must be protected online from mental health dangers, social media addiction, and cyberbullying. It’s a tall task, with no easy answers. Authorities are rolling out bans, age checks, and identity wallets. They are giving platforms new responsibilities, and regulators new powers. Juries are finding companies guilty of addictive platform design.
In the US, courts are taking the lead. After a New Mexico jury found that Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, liable for endangering children, the court ordered the social media company to pay $375 million in damages. In response, Meta has threatened to shut down social media networks in New Mexico.
Another case in California found that Meta and YouTube harmed a young user with addictive design features that led to her mental health distress. Meta and YouTube must pay $4.2 million and $1.8 million, respectively, in fines. Dozens of similar cases are clogging US courts. They accuse tech companies of creating products as addictive as cigarettes.
But the damning verdicts and fines fail to answer how to prevent the damages. They punish. They don’t repair. The courts so far have not suggested or imposed changes to the design of social media platforms.
Europe is taking a regulatory path, also struggling to find effective solutions. Leaders have discovered that online child protection is one of the few tech issues that voters appreciate. A recent survey across six major EU countries found that three in four respondents support government-set minimum ages for social media.
Bans are the easiest answer to explain and the hardest to make work. They give governments a clean message: children should not be there. A series of EU countries are passing laws to prohibit children under 15 or 16 from using social media.
But bans push back the real question. Who checks? On what basis? How often? With what data? And what happens when children move somewhere else?
To answer these questions, age verification has moved to the center of the debate. If the law treats children differently from adults online, platforms need a way to determine the difference. At present, Europeans tick a box that says, “I am over 18.” That’s ineffective.
Authorities want a trusted tool. In April, the European Commission launched a new age verification app that can be used to prove the age of users online before accessing certain platforms, without sharing their personal information with the platforms themselves. It’s the first of its kind to introduce a centralized, bloc-wide approach to verifying users’ ages.
If built properly, the app could create a more credible enforcement system, and give regulators something more useful than public scolding. Even if different companies want different — at the device level, the app-store level, or the operating-system level — the app avoids forcing every platform to collect identity documents directly.
Dangers remain, starting with security. Within hours of its April 2026 debut, security consultants demonstrated that the app could be bypassed in less than two minutes. The requirements to scan identity documents creates a “goldmine” for potential data breaches and identity theft. The app also fails to address structural issues like addictive platform design or harmful algorithms.
Then there’s the potential knock-on risks. A system built to separate minors from adults changes the entry conditions for everyone. Once that checkpoint exists, others will want to use it. Governments may want it for pornography, gambling, alcohol, extremism, misinformation, scams, political advertising, or whatever comes next. Regulators may want it because it eases enforcement.
Despite the most effective age checks, a verified teenager can still be pushed toward harmful content. A platform can still optimize for compulsion, outrage, sexualized attention, and endless scrolling. Predators will adapt. Reporting tools will fail.
Tech companies have made efforts to identify underage users by their behavior on platforms and parental control options are now generally standard – even if parents do not always use the tools available. Most big tech companies work with legal authorities in combatting child exploitation and explicit content. Despite such efforts, almost everyone agrees that the era of platforms writing their own safety homework should end. But this well-intentioned consensus fails to answer the crucial question of how to achieve the goal of protecting children. The West could end up with more checks, more credentials, more friction, and more control — without solving the fundamental challenge of dangerous algorithms.
Dr. Anda Bologa is a senior researcher in the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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