What changed between the plenary report and the adopted text

45. Stresses the importance of understanding the phenomenon of the online disinhibition effect, which refers to the reduction of social restraints and empathy in online communication due to anonymity, physical distance and the absence of non-verbal cues; notes that this effect can lead to increased aggression, insults and cyberbullying; highlights the need to provide targeted and, where possible, individually tailored support for young people in school, at home, in institutional care and in other communal and social environments;

46. Urges online platforms to ensure a swift and proportionate response to cyberbullying-related content and conduct, and to transparently report on its prevalence, and the response times and enforcement actions taken in countering it; stresses that content moderators play a crucial role in addressing online hate, and encourages online platforms to engage with independent civil society experts and researchers in developing and delivering their training, in this regard; underlines that transparency is essential to reveal the true extent of online hate, to identify potential algorithmic biases in detection systems and to ensure platforms’ accountability; calls on online platforms to cooperate with civil society organisations, educational institutions, child protection services, parents and caregivers in developing effective cyberbullying-prevention campaigns and in raising awareness of existing reporting mechanisms;

47. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to ensure long-term and sustainable funding, as well as systematic national visibility, for helplines and hotlines operating within the Safer Internet Centres network; stresses that these are key tools for providing immediate, professional and anonymous support to children and parents facing abuse or exposure to inappropriate online content;

Action plan against cyberbullying

48. Welcomes the Commission’s action plan against cyberbullying and its common definition of cyberbullying at EU level; calls on the Commission and the Member States to ensure that online platforms are held responsible for preventing and countering cyberbullying, and to establish a European mechanism for the exchange of best practices among the Member States; underlines the importance of multidisciplinary cooperation between educational institutions, law enforcement authorities and relevant child protection services in the prevention and early detection of cases of cyberbullying; calls on the Commission to require online platforms to provide minors with an accessible reporting interface, and to ensure that platform design is safe by design and by default, including the possibility to block and report harmful contact and conduct;

Mental health

49. Stresses that social media can cause addiction and thus serious mental health harms, particularly for minors, with links to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and body image issues;

50. Encourages awareness-raising campaigns targeting young people, families and schools, similar to initiatives such as Safer Internet Day, to prevent digital addiction, promote critical thinking, foster peer support skills and encourage healthier and more responsible social media habits; urges the Commission to develop comprehensive, evidence-based guidelines on healthy technology use and appropriate digital content, tailored by age group, focusing on usage patterns and screen time; stresses that such guidelines should serve as a reference for the design and safety features of digital services accessible to minors; calls on the Commission, in coordination with the Member States, to encourage online platforms to implement default user-friendly measures for minors’ accounts, including periodic prompts to take a break, configurable time-outs, and regular, unobtrusive notifications to users indicating the duration of their activity;

51. Highlights the positive role of sport and physical activity and community engagement in promoting the mental and physical well-being of young people; encourages the Commission and the Member States to promote regular offline activities, such as community-based arts, sports and civic engagement, as part of a broader strategy to reduce the excessive use of social media among young people and support their healthy development;

52. Calls on the Member States to ensure rapid access to mental-health support and psychological assistance for all young people, including by investing in grassroots, peer-led and community-driven psychosocial services; calls for psychological counselling in schools, dedicated support lines and awareness campaigns; calls for the implementation of suicide-prevention protocols on major online platforms, including the visible display of helpline numbers and support resources; warns that online tools, such as AI companions and chatbots, cannot replace mental health professionals and may be dangerous if used as a means of solving serious mental health issues;

53. Calls on online platforms to mitigate the impact of addictive and persuasive design features on the well-being of children and young people by implementing risk-based safeguards for recommender systems, and measures to effectively address, phase out and ban the most harmful addictive practices;

54. Calls for accessible and child-appropriate support services, including counselling, reporting mechanisms and legal assistance, for minors affected by AI-generated sexualised images and deepfakes;

Influencers and targeted advertising

55. Highlights the fact that social media influencers play an increasingly significant role in shaping the perceptions, aspirations and social attitudes of children and young people; welcomes the Commission’s efforts to ensure influencers’ compliance with existing legislation, including by setting up the Influencer Legal Hub; calls on the Commission and the Member States to develop a code of conduct for influencers, agencies and online platforms at EU level, including commitments to advertise responsibly towards minors, the clarification of responsibilities at different points of the value chain – such agencies representing influencers, and the brands whose products and services are being promoted – and the avoidance of harmful or misleading content;

56. Stresses the need for legislative action, including by establishing a harmonised definition of ‘influencer marketing’, and to strengthen, where appropriate, the prohibition of unfair commercial practices, in order to ensure full transparency in influencer advertising and influencer marketing that targets young people, as they have particular difficulty distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial content; underlines the importance of sponsorship disclosures and ethical standards, and highlights the risks presented by misleading marketing whereby advertisements are hidden as organic content, such as the consumption of unhealthy foods or engagement in gambling-like practices;

57. Calls on the Commission to protect minors from being commercially exploited in the context of ‘sharenting’ and ‘kidfluencing’ activities; calls on the Commission to take into account the progress made by some of the Member States in addressing sharenting, and to consider measures to limit this practice in order to protect children’s rights to their own images and to prevent their digital overexposure;

Harmful content, age verification and the protection of minors

58. Regrets the fact that several mechanisms used by online platforms to control access to their services, such as self-declaration, are easily bypassed, and that minors still have widespread access to age-inappropriate content;

59. Stresses the need for effective, privacy-preserving age and child-rights compliant verification tools to verify a user’s age when required, without the collection or retention of personal data, in line with EU data protection standards, the AVMSD and the DSA;

60. Welcomes the development of the EU Digital Identity Wallet framework, which sets the standards for age-verification features; underlines that any age verification tool must strictly comply with the GDPR principles of data minimisation and purpose limitation, and should enable proof-of-age without revealing identity; supports models using trusted third parties with double anonymity mechanisms, in which the verifier cannot identify the service, and the service cannot identify the user, as provided for under the Regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market (which established the electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) framework); calls on the Commission and the Council to promote coordinated investments and incentives for the deployment of the age-verification app across the Member States;

61. Calls, therefore, on the Commission to ensure that any age assurance mechanisms are supervised by public authorities, and comply with the privacy-preserving, non-intrusive and non-discriminatory-by-design architecture, interoperability and security requirements of the EU Digital Identity Wallet;

62. Calls on the Commission to establish, in coordination with the Member States, an EU mechanism for monitoring the effectiveness of child online protection policies, including the implementation of age restrictions, age-verification tools and safety settings on platforms, making use of existing capacities, in particular Eurostat data and methodologies; notes the current fragmentation across the Member States, and the fact that some of the Member States have implemented advanced measures to enhance the protection of minors online; encourages strong coordination at EU level, in this regard;

Minimum digital age

63. Welcomes the favourable consideration expressed by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen regarding the introduction of a harmonised, EU-wide minimum age limit for access to social media (a minimum digital age); takes note of the initiatives already undertaken by certain Member States, in this regard; stresses the need for a harmonised EU approach to establishing a minimum digital age and, in this context, welcomes the conclusions of the Commission’s special panel of experts on child safety online, which provides guidance on this matter; welcomes, furthermore, the announcement made by President von der Leyen about a legislative proposal on the matter;

64. Recalls that Article 8 GDPR establishes age thresholds for valid consent between the ages of 13 and 16, which can be determined nationally; underlines the lack of implementation of Article 8(2) GDPR, which stipulates that the controller should make reasonable efforts to verify that consent is given or authorised by minors’ guardians; stresses that existing instruments should be duly implemented by service providers, including privacy-by-design and privacy-by-default, data minimisation and purpose-limitation principles; recalls that the Commission guidelines under Article 28 of the DSA emphasise that access restrictions and age-assurance mechanisms alone cannot be substitutes for other, more structural measures recommended in the guidelines; stresses that Article 28b(3), point (f) AVMSD provides for the establishment of age-verification systems on VSPs to protect minors from content that may impair their physical, mental or moral development; underlines that the effective implementation of such systems should lead to a safer online environment for children and young people, while fully respecting their privacy;

Parental control

65. Commends existing parental control tools and calls on the Commission to develop a non-prescriptive, technology-neutral EU framework of minimum functional standards for such tools, accompanied by an EU certification scheme to increase uptake and cross-device effectiveness; stresses that these tools must be user-friendly, privacy-respecting by default and accessible to all parents and guardians;

66. Expresses concern that parents and guardians often lack the knowledge or tools to effectively monitor their children’s online activities, and that even when parental controls exist, they are frequently difficult to find or easily circumvented; urges platforms to take greater responsibility for the effectiveness and visibility of these systems, and calls on them to publish data on their uptake and performance;

67. Urges online platforms to take greater responsibility for protecting children and young people from harmful or manipulative content; encourages, furthermore, the Commission to consider introducing personal liability in cases of serious and persistent non-compliance with the protection provisions concerning minors set out in Articles 34 and 35 DSA, in order to incentivise better compliance;

68. Underlines that regulated media service providers, in particular independent public service media providers regulated in line with the principles of the European Media Freedom Act, offer a broad range of content and services for children and young people that are adapted to their development needs; calls on online platforms to ensure their recommender systems and content moderation mechanisms give more visibility to reliable and age-appropriate content and services provided by such professional media organisations;

69. Calls on the Commission, in cooperation with the Member States, relevant bodies, platforms and experts, to develop specific guidelines and tools to combat the spread of disinformation targeting young people online; stresses the need to integrate the labelling of suspicious content, the removal of false information that may endanger children’s health or safety, and the promotion of reliable sources through educational tools and algorithmic recommendations;

Safeguarding tools for young people in online platform designs

70. Calls on the Commission to clarify the interplay between existing legislation regulating targeted advertising and manipulative design, including dark patterns, in order to close further legal gaps in the rules and their implementation, and, where appropriate, to address the practices that target children and young people; calls on online platforms to provide users with the functionality to choose between different recommender systems, including trustworthy, child-focused options; calls, furthermore, for the establishment of mandatory safe default settings for recommender systems;

Video games

71. Recognises that video games constitute a major part of young people’s online leisure and social interaction, and combine creative, social and competitive elements; points out that video games fall under the scope of the DSA when they qualify as an intermediary service or platform; stresses, however, that providers of video games that do not meet these criteria are not bound by the rules set out in the DSA; calls on the Commission, where applicable, to ensure minimum DSA-equivalent obligations for all online video games, regardless of whether or not they qualify as an online platform under the DSA;

72. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to regulate online games and applications that incorporate paid purchase or reward systems (loot boxes and other randomised content, such as wheels of fortune, prize wheels and packs of cards), which induce compulsive behaviour in minors and expose them to forms of digital gambling; calls for the evaluation of potential measures, such as the mandatory disclosure of odds and the explicit labelling of randomised reward mechanics as a means of protection for minors;

73. Encourages the adoption of the PEGI age-rating system across online storefronts, platforms and consoles, and calls for its increased visibility; calls on the Commission to work with PEGI and the competent national authorities to ensure that age ratings are prominent in digital storefront metadata and that age controls are interoperable across platforms;

74. Encourages the video game industry to develop a voluntary code of conduct for online multiplayer games and streaming services, in consultation with children, educators, researchers and civil society, covering moderation standards, child-friendly reporting mechanisms, escalation procedures and recommended technical safeguards, such as default chat muting for minors and keyword filters;

75. Calls for collaboration among video game designers, publishers, platforms, national competent authorities and the Commission, to help mitigate the risks of gaming disorders; calls on the Commission and the Member States to develop awareness-raising campaigns to ensure that parents and guardians are equipped to identify risks and provide support;

Civic engagement and democratic participation

76. Notes that online platforms may serve as important channels for civic education and critical thinking, enabling young people to engage in civic and political life; highlights the need to maintain a free and pluralist social and digital environment; warns, however, of the risks posed by disinformation, fake news and online harassment, which could hinder engagement;

77. Emphasises that, according to several academic studies, some recommender systems of major online platforms have been shown to favour extreme content, as such content leads to increased user engagement and therefore increased profits, which increases the risk of youth radicalisation, e.g. through an ‘echo chambers’ effect; calls on the Commission to prioritise the enforcement of the DSA and to strengthen its corresponding guidelines against engagement-based algorithms driven by clicks, views and interactions, which fail to sufficiently protect users against addiction, radicalisation and disinformation; stresses that criminal networks, extremists, terrorists and traffickers exploit online environments to target, manipulate or recruit minors; calls for the detection, reporting and removal of such illegal content to be strengthened, in full respect of the DSA and the Charter;

Inclusion, equity and accessibility

79. Stresses that anti-gypsyism constitutes a specific form of racism, rooted in the historical discrimination and social exclusion of Roma and Traveller communities; underlines that anti-gypsyism often remains undetected, as it is not always recognised as a form of discrimination by institutions or the wider public; stresses, therefore, the need to provide regular and comprehensive training for online platforms, content reviewers and relevant stakeholders on the detection, recognition and effective response to anti-gypsyism, in order to ensure equal protection and accountability; stresses that organisations representing groups with limited resources, including minority and marginalised communities, such as the Roma community, should not be disadvantaged in efforts to combat online hate;

Education, digital skills and media literacy

80. Recalls that the Member States have an obligation, under the AVMSD, to promote media literacy and take such measures at national level; emphasises, furthermore, that the Member States have an obligation to report to the Commission on these measures, and to determine if those need to be further reinforced and expanded; calls on the European Board for Media Services to intensify cooperation on the exchange of best practices, and to foster the development and use of effective measures and tools to strengthen these competences; notes that efforts to empower users through media literacy and content labelling vary widely across online platforms and result in a lack of transparency on geographic scope, user engagement and measurable outcomes; calls on audiovisual media service providers and VSPs to comply with their obligations under the AVMSD and the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation;

81. Calls on the Member States and online platforms to establish regular consultations with children, young people and parents when designing age-appropriate safety features, reporting tools and educational materials, ensuring that such solutions reflect their actual needs and patterns of technology use;

82. Highlights the key role of both formal and non-formal education in equipping children and young people with the digital, media and AI literacy skills needed to navigate social media and online environments safely and effectively, including critical thinking, reading comprehension and the ability to protect themselves in digital environments from manipulation, disinformation and profiling;

83. Highlights the importance of reinforcing financial literacy in formal and non-formal education systems, in order to mitigate risks linked to emerging digital and AI-driven environments;

84. Underlines the need to provide continuing digital, media and AI literacy programmes for professionals working with children and young people on online safety, disinformation, AI, cyberbullying, critical engagement with digital content, awareness of persuasive, addictive and manipulative design, and emotional profiling, in order to strengthen digital pedagogy and promote safe classroom practices, and to enable informed professional judgements on when and how to make the best use of digital tools in education and youth work; encourages schools and youth organisations to make digital, media and AI literacy a mandatory component of school curricula from an early age;

85. Highlights the importance of ensuring that young people have access to reliable, evidence-based and age-appropriate information on sexual and reproductive health and rights; stresses that, in the absence of trustworthy sources, young people may turn to social media content that is inaccurate, misleading or harmful;

86. Calls on the Member States to consider introducing clear rules on the use of mobile devices in schools, particularly at early and primary education levels, which may include exceptions for educational purposes, and to ensure secure internet networks and safe device storage; stresses the need to monitor the effects of such measures on learning, concentration and peer-related online violence;

87. Underlines the importance of providing easily accessible education for parents, guardians and caregivers, in order to foster resilience against misinformation and disinformation; stresses that such education should cover technical aspects, such as privacy settings, to build trust and open communication with children about their online experiences, risk awareness and reporting mechanisms;

88. Invites the Member States to promote regular dialogues between parents, guardians, schools and youth organisations, on daily routines such as device-free time, bedtime practices and notification management, in order to support healthier social media use;

89. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to reinforce and implement existing digital literacy programmes, including the EU Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027 and the EU’s Better Internet for Kids (BIK+) strategy, by supporting Safer Internet Centres and campaigns such as Safer Internet Day, and the development of new age-appropriate programmes and interactive educational tools, co-designed with educators and civil society; highlights the importance of a stronger role of Erasmus+ and other EU youth programmes in this context, as they promote democratic engagement and cross-border dialogue among young people; welcomes the upcoming European school alliances pilot and calls on the Commission to prioritise digital and media literacy within this framework to foster innovative teaching methods, curricula and competence frameworks;

90. Urges the Commission to deliver on the actions set out in its action plan on basic skills and its inclusion therein of digital skills, in particular the guidelines and best practices on advancing the assessment of digital skills in education and the updating of the European Digital Competence Framework to take into account emerging technologies; stresses the need to support local community centres for children and young people, in order to provide safe offline spaces and alternatives to excessive social media use;

Transparency and algorithmic accountability

91. Stresses the need for increased transparency around social media algorithmic systems, as opaque algorithms and content moderation hinder the ability of young users to comprehend why certain content is recommended, suppressed or removed, thus undermining their capacity to navigate online content in accordance with their own intentions; calls for robust external auditing mechanisms and strengthened oversight through the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency;

92. Recalls that Article 27 DSA requires that users should be given meaningful control over recommender systems, including the possibility to choose alternative systems not based on profiling, and encourages platforms to make such options prominent and accessible, particularly for minors; calls for the establishment of mandatory safe default settings for recommender systems for minors’ accounts;