The EU Kids Act will be presented before the European Parliament today, and if passed, gamers of all ages will have to verify their ages before logging on to play. It’s all part of the European Union’s broader effort to prevent children’s brains from melting from overexposure to online life.
According to draft documents obtained by Euractiv, the proposed law would set up a strict, tiered hierarchy of digital banishment. Kids under 13 are completely barred from standard social media. Teens 13 to 15 get limited access to “mini accounts” that parents heavily control and cap at one hour of screen time per day.
Only when the kid turns 15 do they earn the right to autonomous digital access, and even then platforms have to keep strict safety guards active until they hit 18.
Europe’s Proposed Online Age Checks Could Affect Gamers of All Ages
All of this would apply just as much to social media apps as it does to online video games and AI chatbots. The act would also affect common online features like infinite scrolling and autoplay, basically anything that can lead to addiction. It would also impose regulations on recommendation-algorithm feeds for minors.
Australia and the UK have made similar moves over the past year. The results have been mixed thus far, as kids and teens have found a series of clever ways to bypass security measures, because for all its good intentions, when a horny teenage boy wants to watch porn, he is going to watch porn.
And he will tear down your intricately constructed security measures brick by brick just to see some naughty bits.
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