Europe's under-13 social media floor

Europe is about to redefine what it means to be "old enough" online. On Monday, the EU's expert panel on child safety — via EUobserver's 'Briefed' transcript — recommended 13 as a single Europe-wide floor for opening a social media account, a number that would override national rules in France and Spain (16) and Greece (15) and, for the first time, pull YouTube inside the same net.

The wire will say "EU bans social media for kids." The mechanism is bigger. The expert panel's numbers — between four and six hours a day, more than half reporting psychological or emotional harm online — are the receipt for a tripod Brussels is about to assemble: an age floor, an EU-built age-verification app the Commission has been pushing since April, and a design-constraint regime targeting infinite scroll, autoplay, and default engagement-maximising settings. Call it the design floor — what Brussels analysts describe as a regulatory tripod: minimum age, minimum tool to prove it, minimum design rules the platform cannot engineer around that makes a national opt-out structurally costly.

Higher national ages are still possible; the lower rungs of the on-ramp are now regulated from Brussels.

Von der Leyen is widely expected to put this on the table in September. Watch the friction: age-verification rollout, YouTube's scope fight, and the freedom-of-expression push that arrives when engagement-optimising code becomes illegal by default. The wire will run "ban." The real story is the tripod that survives the ban not surviving.