EU KIDS Act (Age ID Checks for Social Media)
- Proposed
- Parliament position
- Trilogue
- Adopted
Proposed by the Commission September 17, 2026; Parliament committee referral pending
The European Commission's plan to make a government-certified age credential, with the EU Digital Identity Wallet as the model, the price of a social media account for everyone in the EU, sold as a ban for under-15s.
Latest update
Commission adopted the proposal and sent it to Parliament and Council
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Official bill recordKey facts
- Where
- European Union
- Bill number
- COM(2026) 681 / 2026/0286(COD)
- Status
- Introduced
- Introduced
- September 17, 2026
- Threat
- High
- Last update
- September 17, 2026
Topics
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What it does
Proposed on September 17, 2026 as COM(2026) 681, the regulation makes social networks and video-sharing platforms check the age of every user at signup, and they may rely only on a third-party EU age verification solution certified by a public authority. EU Digital Identity Wallets count as certified, and member states must provide a free solution. Within six months platforms must check existing accounts and disable any held by under-15s or by anyone whose age cannot be established. The stated goal is an account ban for under-15s on services with profiling feeds, contact with strangers or live streaming, with guardian-run accounts for 13- and 14-year-olds capped at one hour a day and parent-account access to child video services for ages 3 to 12. Games, AI chatbots, app stores and operating systems also fall in scope: users get restricted child defaults until an age check shows they are adults. Enforcement runs through the Digital Services Act, the EU's online censorship law, and the AI Act, with fines up to 6 percent of global turnover.
What’s at stake
Keeping under-15s out requires age checks on everyone else, which means ID checks, so the burden of this law falls on adults. When the EU passed eIDAS 2.0, Article 5a(15) promised that the digital identity wallet would stay voluntary and that people who decline it would face no disadvantage in reaching private services. Under this proposal, an adult with no certified credential loses the social media account and gets the child version of games, chatbots and app stores. Accounts whose age “cannot be established,” which covers anonymous and pseudonymous users, are to be disabled.
Our take
The Commission named it KIDS and sold it as child protection. The text requires adults in all 27 member states to hold a state-certified credential before they can open a social media account, keep an existing one, or use a chatbot without restrictions. The promised zero-knowledge design limits what a platform learns about you, and you still need the government's credential to get through the door. The Commission also keeps the power to widen the list of features that trigger the check by delegated act, so the checkpoint can grow without a new vote.
Timeline
Commission adopted the proposal and sent it to Parliament and CouncilLatest
The record
Sponsor
European Commission
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