EU social media proposal shifts responsibility to platforms, Pakosta says

Estonia’s Justice and Digital Minister Liisa Pakosta said the proposed European social media rules place more responsibility on platforms and better reflect Estonia’s position, ERR reported.

The proposal, known as the EU KIDS Act, includes banning social media use for children under 13 and requiring online service providers to create safer accounts for children.

Pakosta said negotiations must continue before concluding that Estonian children will be subject to a social media ban.

“The current proposal has changed significantly from the original, and it has changed in the direction Estonia wants. We want the platforms to change,” Pakosta said on the television news programme Aktuaalne kaamera.

She said Estonia had helped shift the direction of the proposal by arguing that platforms themselves must become safer.

“We are talking about a situation where social media can be dangerous in certain circumstances. It is like a bus with faulty brakes. Sometimes there is an accident and sometimes there is not, but the brakes are broken,” Pakosta said.

She added that children should not simply be barred from using social media while adults continued to use unsafe platforms. Instead, the platforms should fix their problems and avoid harming the mental health of people of any age.

Pakosta said she did not consider shared parent-child accounts a realistic solution. She questioned whether parents would be able to monitor all the messages of a 13 or 15-year-old child through a joint account.

She said Australia was also changing its laws in the direction Estonia had proposed with researchers, namely that platforms must change. People and children must be protected, she said, but this requires rules preventing platforms from keeping users tied to them in harmful ways.

Asked whether Europe could bring the platforms under control, Pakosta pointed to the European Union’s 450 million people and said other countries were moving in the same direction.

Pakosta also said an age limit was not a solution. She argued that age restrictions had not worked anywhere in the world when applied to reading content or viewing images online.

“I am very pleased with about half of this proposal because it reflects what we have wanted in Estonia. Platforms must change so that they no longer harm children or adults,” Pakosta said.