At Meta, ensuring the safety of young people is a top priority and we’ve spent over a decade building our products for teens with this in mind. Across the industry, there is growing recognition that teens deserve consistent protection across all the different digital platforms they use. That’s why we support proposals to establish a common Digital Majority Age across EU member states, whereby parents need to approve their younger teens’ access to digital services, including social media.
We believe this can be an effective solution to the industry-wide challenge of ensuring teens have safe, age-appropriate experiences online, if it is grounded in three key principles:
Guiding principles for an EU-Wide Digital Majority Age
- Parental Approval of App Downloads by Younger Teens
Parents want to be involved in their teen’s online lives: Recent polling by Morning Consult found that three-quarters of EU parents support parental approval for app downloads for teens under 16. We agree that parents know their teens best, and they should be the ones who have final say over what online services they are comfortable with their teens using. Regulation should empower this, underpinning their ability to make decisions for their family. There’s growing support for this approach in and outside of Europe. - Consistency Across Industry
Any new provisions should apply broadly across the digital services teens use — not just to social media platforms. Teens engage with a variety of apps – at least 40 apps per week on average, including gaming, streaming, messaging, and browsing. Focusing only on social media would miss the full picture and could push teens toward unregulated and less safe digital spaces. - Address Age Verification
For a Digital Majority Age to work, robust age verification mechanisms are critical. We have and continue to be supportive of solutions that reduce the burden on parents: They should be easy-to-use, privacy-preserving and work consistently across industry. That’s why we have been supportive of an EU-wide solution at the app store or operating system level. However, what is most important is that this is a simple, privacy-protective mechanism that offers a consistent experience to parents across the EU.
To be clear, our support for an EU-wide Digital Majority Age is not an endorsement of government mandated social media bans. Bans take away parental authority, focus narrowly on one type of online service among the nearly two million apps available to teens, and overlook how teens use social media to connect with the world around them, grow and learn. Bans also fail to acknowledge the differences that exist between different services and varying levels of protections they offer.
Safety and Support for Teens
Meta takes youth safety incredibly seriously and we recently launched Teen Accounts to better support parents, and bring them peace of mind that their teens can use social media to connect with their friends and explore their interests with the right protections in place.
Teen Accounts have built-in protections which limit who can contact a teen and the content they see. They set time reminders prompting teens to take breaks from our apps and turn off notifications at night to support a good night’s sleep. Millions of teens in Europe are automatically placed into Teen Accounts, and teens under 16 need a parent’s permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. And with supervision parents can set individual time limits, e.g. no Instagram during dinner or school hours.
Teens will continue to use digital services to socialize, be creative and explore who they are. Parents want to feel confident that their teens can use social media safely, and deserve tools to guide those experiences, not bans that bypass their input. A thoughtful, EU-wide Digital Majority Age — grounded in parental approval, strong age verification, and consistency across industry — can help achieve that.
