EU Leaders Weigh New Rules for Teen Social Media Access

European officials are meeting in Brussels this week to evaluate whether the region should move toward stricter limits on teen access to social media, a topic gaining political momentum in several countries. The discussions come as governments worldwide consider tougher age controls, raising questions about how platforms can reliably verify user ages without creating new privacy risks.

Google, which will participate in the talks, outlined its stance ahead of the meetings. The company argues that current debates often frame the issue “as a false choice between weak age gates and invasive ID scans”, noting that users want better protections but not at the expense of handing over sensitive documents. Google instead supports what it calls a risk-based approach to age assurance, where more intrusive checks are reserved for areas like adult content or alcohol sales, while lower-risk services rely on lighter touch verification.

The broader issue, however, concerns how any of these checks can work at scale. Tech companies have tested several approaches—including video-based verification and machine learning models—but there is no industry consensus on a method that is both accurate and privacy-preserving. Google also maintains that responsibility for age checks should fall on individual services rather than app stores, comparing it to how stores—not credit card issuers—handle age verification in person.

That position contrasts sharply with recommendations from Meta, which argues that centralized age verification at the app-store level would reduce privacy exposure by preventing individual apps from collecting IDs. According to Meta, “Apps would only need the age from the app store to ensure teens are placed in the right experiences,” avoiding repeated requests for sensitive documents across dozens of platforms.