Voices from the Community follows on from our previous series, Digital and Media Literacy in EDMO (Round Tables 1 & 2), in which we interviewed each of the 14 Hubs (now 15) about their digital and media literacy activities and societal resilience actions. With this new monthly series, we turn to the wider community – researchers, practitioners, policy analysts, and other experts – with a short set of questions on a specific topic, method, or debate in the field. Interviews are published as an article on the EDMO website, featured in our Monthly Media Literacy Digest, and shared through our newsletter and social media channels.
This month’s interview focuses on the EU KIDS Act, proposed by the European Commission on 17 September 2026, which introduces EU-wide minimum-age rules and safety-by-design requirements for social media, video-sharing platforms, online games, and AI companions and chatbots. We spoke with Andy Demeulenaere, General Coordinator of Mediawijs (the Flemish Knowledge Centre for Digital and Media Literacy), about what the Act means in practice, and what it means for media literacy work going forward.
1. The EU KIDS Act is a very ambitious piece of legislation. What’s your first reaction – and how implementable do you think it really is?
Well, on the one hand, we see that the EU Commission has really listened to the experts and the lessons learned from the Australian experiment. The main point is clear: reversing the burden of proof onto the platforms that will have to prove that they are safe. The commission also focuses on gradual age limits, instead of one steep age gate, on certain safety by design limits and controls and on clear privacy preserving age verification. And they’re also involving gaming platforms and AI-applications that can function as companions in this legislation, although the rules in the act for them are much less strict and more unclear at the moment.
On the other hand, the Commission’s proposal is much stricter than most experts have advised. Reports like that form President Von der Leyen’s Special panel on Child Safety Online, the German Independent Expert Commission on Child and Youth Protection in the Digital World or the Belgian High Council for Health put the age of 13 more at the centre of their recommendations to provide certain restrictions that the Commission puts at 15. This might be necessary for a political compromise, but it might also make it less easy to implement and possibly less effective.
2. Some countries have pushed back against blanket restrictions over digital freedom concerns? (Estonia and Czech Republic, Euronews, “EU Kids Act: The EU’s plan to make the internet safer for kids,” 22 September 2026 — https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/09/22/eu-kids-act-the-eus-plan-to-make-the-internet-safer-for-kids)
Any regulation involving some sort of media is a difficult balancing act. It’s not just a consumer product or comparable to drugs legislation. Rights like Access to information, Freedom of Expression and of Association, to name but a few, are clearly enshrined in Human and Children’s Rights. Especially for Children, respecting their rights to provision and participation are just as important as their right to protection. In this case there are several arguments that should caution any authority into treading steadily, but carefully.
– Safer Internet Centers and researchers have rightly been asking to regulate platforms better for years, especially where the burden of proof and safety by design are concerned, but the current push for regulation is often more based on popular bestsellers and moral panic than on actual research and practice, this begs the question if some stricter aspects of the regulation are warranted. Outside of specific crisis situations, parents shouldn’t control every aspect of young people’s social lives and support them in building their identity. In certain contexts, it is even essential for young people that their parents don’t know who they are in contact with to help them with the crisis they face.
– The Commission puts forward a clear road for age verification, which can make this a much stronger regulation than the Australian one, but cybersecurity and privacy experts still warn that we are giving extra data to platforms and that this introduces a surveillance system that could be misused in the wrong hands or for other forms of governmental policing, and can also be subject to severe data leaks (https://csa-scientist-open-letter.org/ageverif-Feb2026).
– The effect of the regulation on adults in general is unclear: who will be asked to verify their age? Will there also be regulation soon to provide adults with a safer and better experience on social media or in AI-companions too or will this no longer be a political priority?
– The question also remains how effective all this will be. Young people are notoriously adept to circumventing rules and technological barriers or shifting to other systems, while once the age gating is circumvented, the platforms aren’t any safer. We all know parents need to be actively involved in their children’s digital and media education, but this regulation may push them much more in a policing role than in a parenting role, which might be counterproductive and cause more stress in families, not less. Many parents also don’t feel comfortable with or able to handle digital parental controls and might choose not to use them, choosing to apply an absolute age gate at 15 or to help circumvent the measures or even think they are applying an age gate, while their children have circumvented it. In the first Australian reports, we see that children aren’t necessarily using social media less, but their parent know it less.
3. Age verification could also exclude people who simply can’t verify their age at all; such as those who are unhoused or without secure migration status. How should that be handled?
The age verification the Commission puts forward relies on
- the availability of the necessary applications, that are sufficiently secure and are certified to be in line with the EU Age Verification Scheme,
- the availability of a government supported verification possibility for age 13,
- the necessary digital access and skills for young people and parents and anyone who may be asked to verify their age, to do this.
Each of these aspects can pose new barriers for digital participation, especially among socially, economically and digitally more vulnerable groups. Will there be a certified verification application in time for the implementation of the regulation? Will there even be a process of certification? Will the national government have implemented a system like the EU wallet in time? And how will these systems take into account that not every young person and parent might have the same identification possibilities or the same access and competences. Who will manage parental controls after a divorce? Who will do it when children are in care homes …?
The Commission and Member states should already be making an inventory of these risks and be formulating appropriate answers, but I’m afraid that might not be top of mind at the moment. In practice this could undo the whole gradual approach that the regulation foresees and cause more frustration with the regulation, than satisfaction …
4. The Act also covers AI companions and chatbots, though some are reluctant to classify them as VLOSEs, given how different they are from a search engine. What’s your take on that inclusion?
As soon as the ground gets too hot under their feet, young people tend to just switch to other systems. We already saw shifts from TikTok and Snapchat to YouTube and WhatsApp, not because they are safer, but because they’re less scrutinised. The same thing happens with shifts to chatting in games, or on platforms that are less focused on like Discord. And AI-chatbots are one of the most swiftly adopted digital technologies ever. What we see is that young people aren’t using them as much as the productivity apps they might be used for in the work environment, but that they use it for looking up information, for asking life questions and companionship and for entertainment. And they’re bringing their own brand of similar and unique risks with them. This all means that toughening up on social media must coincide with tackling similar issues on other platforms, like games and AI. Classifying GenAI-chatbots as VLOSEs then doesn’t seem that strange to me, especially as advertising is growing in them, but less connected to what’s happening in the KIDS act. Here the focus is more on how child friendly and safe these systems are, with all the moral and cultural unclarity that comes with that. Maybe that’s why they’re not included in the articles that put up age gates, and why a process of Codes of Conduct is introduced and why the app stores are implicated for the age gating. But that does mean the playing field might not turn out to be even, that the process to draw up those codes can take quite some time and that – at least temporarily – young people might still shift to these platforms to avoid social media regulation.
5. The Act leans on age restrictions and safety-by-design rules. Does that reduce the need for media literacy, or make it more necessary?
Digital and media literacy is a basic competence we can’t do without and will still be needed in abundance. You just can’t regulate everything you need to be critical of on social media, every way you can access information or contact, every way you create your self-expression. What the act might do, if it’s effective, is reduce the most excessive risks, like access for young children to completely age-inappropriate content and contacts, by putting up barriers young children will find more difficult than current ones and by raising more awareness in parents. But after that education, awareness, prevention and care will still be as necessary as always on topics like:
- ways of communicating online, not engaging in cyberbullying and hate speech or avoiding contacts with people with a criminal intent,
- ways of accessing and evaluating information online, recognising advertising, bias, propaganda and disinformation and avoiding privacy traps,
- ways of intentionally engaging your time and attention, recognising your feelings when using digital technology and media and self-regulating the time you spend and the content and contact you choose.
And as always, digital technology and media are moving targets, there will always be new technologies, business models and topics to focus on. At least in Flanders, we see that our young people from Generation Z are better at most aspects of digital and media literacy on platforms than any older generation. So there’s still a lot of work to be done towards adults, people with shorter educational records and AI-literacy, even for young people.
The problem is that even now digital and media literacy is not enough of a policy priority around Europe. It’s not sufficiently embedded in education systems, it’s not sufficiently embedded in lifelong learning and media messaging, it’s not sufficiently funded and supported to reach the impact it needs, both qualitatively and quantitatively. So, to be frank, my answer is: the only thing that can reduce the need for digital and media literacy is providing enough of it.
In that light, it is interesting to watch the court cases against social media in New Mexico. In that American state with just over 2 million inhabitants, the hundreds of millions of the fines Meta is convicted to, are mainly directed to youth care, prevention and education. Hundreds of millions. So that’s why I’m watching with great interest “Article 33 – National measures to prepare and support minors”: that includes national strategies, channels for assistance for minors, information and digital literacy, building on the experience of the Safer Internet Centres, the possibility to provide EU funding and exchange of best practices. Until recently the Safer Internet Centres weren’t mentioned in any programme under the next MFF. In the last funding round in 2025 there wasn’t enough funding to fund a centre in every member state. And until now the EU funding is 50% cofunding and there isn’t a matching cofunding in every member states. So, the question might be if the Commission and the member states are prepared to put their money where their legislation is … And as only digital literacy is mentioned here, for us it is paramount that ‘media literacy’ and ‘digital literacy’ aren’t put into two silos, but that they are integrated into digital and media literacy.
6. If you could add one thing to the Act from your own hands-on experience, what would it be?
There are some things we should find an appropriate legislative answer to, but I’m not sure whether the KIDS act is the right regulation to do it in, it might be more for the AVMSD or the DFA, but on the one hand a platform should be responsible for harmful advertisements it makes money from, be it leading to bitcoin scams or CSAM. And next to that, we need to find a better way of dealing with content that triggers or even facilitates anorexia or self-harm or stimulates discrimination, for instance based on gender. And there is a big elephant in the room: if you’re algorithm is curating feeds for people based on content and engagement aspects and prioritises content that it thinks is engaging and polarising, do you not carry editorial responsibility?
Andy Demeulenaere is the General Coordinator of Mediawijs, the Flemish Knowledge Centre for Digital and Media Literacy that helps people in Flanders use and understand digital technology and media in an active, creative, critical and conscious way. They also coordinate media literacy for Flanders in BENEDMO and Betternet, the Belgian Safer Internet Centre.
