EU Committee Backs New 'Youth Mode' and Algorithmic Audits to Protect Minors

This legislative push shifts the B2B streaming and social video landscape from self-regulation to mandatory 'safety-by-design' engineering requirements. For platforms, this necessitates a breakdown of existing ad-targeting stacks and recommendation engines to accommodate a siloed, data-restricted 'youth mode.' As these proposals move toward a full Parliamentary vote in September, they signal an ecosystem-wide pivot where platform liability extends beyond content moderation to the core UI/UX and algorithmic architecture. Streamers should watch for the European Commission’s upcoming September 2026 proposal, which will likely define the specific digital age thresholds and verification methods that will harmonize currently fragmented national rules.

The Committee report follows the July 2026 findings of the European Commission's Special Panel on Child Safety Online, which recommended that children under 13 should not have autonomous access to social media. Per Agence Europe in July 2026, the panel proposed 39 specific measures, including digital literacy mandates for parents and a single EU compliance framework to prevent the regulatory fragmentation currently seen across member states like Estonia and Finland. This alignment work is critical, as the Digital Services Act (DSA) has already seen delays in enforcement, with AlgorithmWatch reporting in early 2026 that third-party scrutiny of platform transparency remain limited.

Regulatory pressure is already translating into concrete enforcement actions. Per European Commission filings in July 2026, regulators preliminarily found Meta in breach of the DSA regarding the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook. Simultaneously, X (formerly Twitter) has been forced to improve its advertising repository and grant researchers API access under an enhanced supervision regime to address systemic risks. These actions demonstrate that the EU is moving beyond high-level policy to technical audits of the internal tools used by major video and social platforms.

The broader legislative environment involves reconciling the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) with the new AI Act. According to EAVI reporting in April 2026, the upcoming revision of the AVMSD aims to clarify Article 28b, which moves beyond simple content warnings to require video-sharing platforms to prove the effectiveness of their media literacy and protection tools. Industry stakeholders, including the Association for Competitive Technology, have urged regulators to differentiate between massive social networks and smaller educational digital services to avoid stifling innovation in the European tech sector, per reports from Agence Europe in July 2026.