Brussels set out how platforms should protect minors

The short answer

The European Commission has told platforms what it will look for when judging whether they meet their existing legal duty to protect minors, but the document that spells this out is guidance, not a new law, so a platform can depart from it and still argue it is compliant by another route.

What the evidence says

On 14 July 2025 the Commission published guidelines on the protection of minors under the Digital Services Act, a regulation that the DSA's official text shows was adopted on 19 October 2022 and published in the Official Journal on 27 October 2022. According to the Commission's announcement of the guidelines, they explain how the Commission expects platforms accessible to minors to meet their obligation under Article 28(1) of the DSA to provide appropriate privacy, safety and security for children. Recommended measures include setting minors' accounts to private by default, limiting screenshot or download functions for content minors post, disabling by default design features associated with compulsive use, and using age assurance methods the guidelines describe as accurate, reliable, robust, non-intrusive and non-discriminatory, with stronger age verification reserved for higher-risk contexts such as adult content and lighter-touch age estimation used elsewhere.

For context

The guidelines are explicitly non-binding: the Commission's own announcement states that following them is voluntary and does not by itself guarantee compliance, and conversely a platform that departs from them is not automatically in breach. Their legal weight comes from Article 28(1) itself, which already requires appropriate and proportionate protection of minors; the guidelines function as the Commission's reference point when assessing whether a platform's own measures meet that standard, which matters most if the Commission opens a formal investigation. This distinction between binding regulation and Commission guidance interpreting it is easy to lose in headlines describing the guidelines as new EU rules for children's accounts.

A practical next step

You could check whether a platform your child uses has moved to private-by-default accounts for minors since mid-2025, since that is one of the guidelines' clearest, most checkable recommendations, and treat its absence as a specific question to raise with the platform rather than a breach in itself.

• Is a minor's account on this service private by default, or does a family have to change that manually?
• Does the platform describe its age assurance method, and does it match the risk of the content involved?
• Would a gap here be a breach of the DSA itself, or only a departure from the Commission's guidance about it?

Reading the guidelines as a checklist of good practice, rather than as enacted law, gives a more accurate sense of what they can and cannot force a platform to do, and of where a complaint would need to point to the underlying regulation instead.