Netherlands and Spain seek an EU-wide minimum age for social media

A joint push before Brussels acts

The Netherlands and Spain circulated a joint paper on September 11 calling for a harmonised European Union minimum age for access to social media. Euronews reported that the proposed framework would reach beyond conventional social networks to video games, artificial-intelligence chatbots and other digital services considered capable of exposing children to significant risks. The initiative lands as the European Commission prepares its own proposal, giving the two governments an opportunity to influence the bloc-wide design before formal negotiations begin.

The paper advocates a risk-based system rather than a blanket rule for every website. Services using addictive recommendation systems, manipulative design or other features associated with harm to minors would face the greatest scrutiny. Providers might be exempted if they could demonstrate that their products were sufficiently safe. That detail matters because it would make platform design and documented risk controls part of the regulatory test, rather than treating every online service identically.

Age checks without identity disclosure

The Dutch and Spanish governments also warned that parental-consent systems can be difficult to enforce and can create additional privacy problems. Their alternative is a European age-verification tool that would confirm only whether a user is above the applicable threshold. It would not disclose the person’s precise age or broader identity to the platform. The proposal therefore ties child protection to data minimisation, a balance that will be central to the coming legislative debate.

European regulators already have evidence that voluntary age limits can be easily evaded. In April, the Commission preliminarily found that Meta had not adequately prevented children younger than 13 from accessing Facebook and Instagram. It specifically identified reliance on self-declared birth dates as an ineffective control because a child could enter a false date. That case remains separate from the new political proposal, but it explains why governments are seeking a common verification mechanism backed by enforceable obligations.

What happens next

The Commission’s forthcoming text will determine whether the Netherlands–Spain approach becomes the basis for an EU standard or one option among several. Questions still to be resolved include the actual minimum age, which services qualify as high risk, what evidence would justify an exemption and how enforcement would interact with the Digital Services Act. A single European framework could reduce the present patchwork of national initiatives, but it will also need to survive proportionality, privacy and fundamental-rights scrutiny before member states and lawmakers can agree on binding rules.