Discussion
1/ 🛑 President Ursula von der Leyen’s #SOTEU announcement on age-gating and banning children’s access to online spaces comes with no surprise.
📝 There is a fundamental problem with the approach: you won’t be making harmful platform safer by preventing young people from using them, you can only achieve that by regulating the platforms in the very first place.
2/ The #EUKidsAct was leaked: while some of the proposed measures make sense & should arguably protect everyone, others risk causing new harm through blanket age restrictions by:
⚠️ Undermining children (& everyone's) rights to information, participation, expression & identity-building
🤖 Creating privacy & cybersecurity risks
🚫 Setting a precedent for exclusion, age-assurance infrastructure could eventually be used to restrict access to other forms of sensitive or politically contested info
3/ Young people themselves say:
🗣️ “To achieve safer digital environments, we must confront the systems that produce harm, not remove those most affected by it. Don’t build a digital world for us, build it with us, so it becomes one we want to inherit.”
Read more in the joint oped we wrote this spring ⤵️
https://edri.org/our-work/youth-organisations-demand-social-media-change-not-bans/
4/ 🛠️ We already have more proportionate tools.
The EU’s #DSA provides mechanisms to address systemic risks and platform design. And the upcoming #DFA offers an opportunity to tackle manipulative and addictive design more directly, for all regardless of age, and beyond social media platforms.
Read our recommendations on the #DFA here ⤵️
https://edri.org/our-work/breaking-the-extractive-digital-business-model-a-rights-based-digital-fairness-act/
5/ European Commission, we have a checklist for you if you *truly* want to ensure children’s digital safety:
✅ Protecting children’s rights to privacy, information & participation
✅ Making platforms safer, regulating addictive & manipulative design for all
✅ Holding platforms accountable for their systemic risks
✅ Strengthening the enforcement of the #DSA
✅ Offering age-related protection rather than imposing measures that are neither necessary nor proportionate, let alone evidence-based
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