Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that everyone in the EU must use the official EU age verification app to verify their age before they can log into or post on social media and other digital services.

As an expert in online child safety, I'm here to expose the disinformation in each von der Leyen's statements. See below.

🇪🇺 The EU Kids Act is a pretext designed to enforce mandatory digital identity verification on everyone in Europe. The proposed legislation applies to any digital service featuring feeds, user generated content, or messaging:

Social media networks, video platforms, online gaming services, AI tools, and media streaming apps like Spotify. (
@TimSweeneyEpic
)

Under the proposal, digital services must enforce age restrictions across strict tiers. Tech companies must mandate age verification across all accounts to enforce these tiers legally.

When Australia introduced its social media ban, the government conceded it failed because platform level age checks weren’t reliable. They now reject age estimation as inadequate and shifted to demanding "robust" age checking.

💡 If you eliminate every unproven estimation method, you’re left with exactly 1 functional mechanism: identity verification. There's not other way to ensure age checking is "robust".

No government wants to admit citizens must prove their real identity just to access apps and basic streaming services like Spotify, so they hide behind the ambiguous phrase "robust age checking". This language is now used across Australia, the US, and Ireland to mandate identity checks while avoiding the public backlash of calling it what it is. I will research to see where else it’s being used.

Below is what Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament in Strasbourg along with my analsyis:

🇪🇺 "Today, much of this power has been taken out of the hands of parents... What our children need is time... But when a child has a smartphone, all of this is taken away."

💡 This framing falsely presents smartphones as uncontrollable. Apple and Google built free OS controls into iOS and Android settings, covering virtually every smartphone on the market.

These controls achieve every legitimate safety objective without collecting personal data or processing state credentials.

💡 Millions of parents use these parental controls to enforce screen time curfews, block app installations, and restrict communication.

💡 These settings operate at the device level. Teens can't bypass them when protected with a passcode.

To bypass this technical reality, the European Commission uses public grief to shut down logical analysis:

🇪🇺 "Day and night, parents see the costs, loss of sleep, anxiety, even self-harm, and in a growing number of cases, even fatal tragedies… a 14-year-old girl living in Belgium who took her life exactly one month ago, victim of bullying online... Honourable members, enough is enough."

💡 Citing personal tragedies replaces software engineering facts with emotional rhetoric. State laws and age gates don’t alter human behaviour or prevent online harassment. Regulators exploit grief to pass surveillance legislation without explaining how the underlying software mechanisms operate.

The Commission outlines specific age tiers to restrict access:

🇪🇺 "In sum, no social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15. That means from 13 to under 15, only mini accounts set up and supervised by parents or guardians with limited features and time restriction to one hour a day. And between 15 and 18, safe design will be an obligation for the platforms."

💡 Enforcing age tiers forces tech companies and service providers to rebuild their architecture around total access control. The must disable self-service account creation, purge unverified accounts, build supervised parental workflows, strip algorithmic feeds, and enforce strict session cutoffs.