EU lawmakers on the European Parliament’s Culture and Education Committee have called for tougher enforcement of existing rules to make social media safer for children and young people, including greater transparency about how platforms’ algorithms work.
In a report adopted on Tuesday by 17 votes to three, with four abstentions, committee members said companies should guarantee that social media and the wider digital environment is safe, particularly for minors, the parliamentary press service reported.
The report calls for online services to follow “privacy-by-design and safety-by-default” principles, meaning protections should be built into products from the start.
The text also backs “age-appropriate design” and “algorithmic transparency”, arguing that opaque recommendation systems and content moderation make it harder for young users to understand why content is promoted, downranked or removed.
Committee members said online platforms should be responsible for protecting minors and called for a ban on the most harmful “addictive” practices, along with risk-based safeguards for recommender systems — the tools that suggest videos, posts or accounts to users.
They also supported a proposed “youth mode” that would disable targeted advertising and limit addictive design features for minors.
Influencers, ‘sharenting’ and AI companions
The report urges the European Commission and EU countries to develop an EU code of conduct for influencers and a harmonised definition of “influencer marketing”, citing the role creators can play in shaping children’s perceptions and social attitudes, the Parliament informed.
It also says minors should be protected from “kidfluencing”, where children are turned into influencers, and “sharenting”, when parents document their children’s lives online.
The committee backed mandatory ethical standards for “AI companions” — services designed to simulate virtual friendships — and called for measures to prevent the manipulation of minors’ emotional vulnerability.
It further called for an explicit ban on AI systems that generate or alter realistic sexual images or videos of an identifiable person without consent, and on synthetic child sexual abuse material.
Rapporteur Sandro Ruotolo said responsibility for children’s online safety “must first and foremost lie with those who design and manage digital platforms.”
The own-initiative report is due to be put to a vote by the full European Parliament during the 14–17 September plenary session.
On average, 97% of young people in the EU used the internet daily in 2024, Eurostat reported, while more than 80% of young people in Europe use social media daily.
