This is the second installment in an AJP series bringing together international perspectives as Seoul weighs age limits and other restrictions on minors’ access to social media.
SEOUL, November 10 (AJP) - As South Korea prepares to build public consensus on the scope and means of regulating minors’ access to social media, international experts urge a careful balance between freedom of expression and safeguards against harm.
The Korea Media and Communications Commission plans to survey public opinion before the end of 2026, following President Lee Jae Myung's call for stronger protections.
Policymakers are considering limits on accounts for children under 14 and curbs on features that encourage excessive use among teenagers, with proposals expected in the first half of 2027.
The debate comes as Europe moves toward more specific obligations for digital platforms.
AJP examined the merits and limitations of existing regulations and emerging proposals through interviews with policymakers, researchers, campaigners and industry representatives.
"We regulate the attention business model, not young people's freedom of expression. Free speech is not the right to an infinite scroll," Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, a French member of the European Parliament from Renew Europe, told AJP.
She said services marketed to children should meet safety standards comparable in principle to those governing toys, food and medicines. Autoplay, endless feeds and recommendations based on behavioral profiling warrant particular scrutiny, she said.
The European Commission proposed the EU KIDS Act on Sept. 17, seeking common rules for social networks, video-sharing platforms, online games and AI chatbots. Its provisions would prohibit social media accounts for children under 13, allow restricted accounts under parental supervision for 13- and 14-year-olds, and permit independent accounts from age 15.
The proposal would also require platforms to incorporate safety into their design, with stronger default protections and limits on features that encourage excessive use. It would prohibit unsolicited contact from strangers and introduce safeguards against AI companions fostering emotional dependency. Providers would have to demonstrate that their services were safe and appropriate for the ages they serve.
The legislation still requires approval by the European Parliament and EU governments.
Its proposed age thresholds differ from those in a non-binding European Parliament resolution adopted in November 2025, which advocated a minimum age of 16, with parental consent permitting access from 13.
Germany is pursuing a complementary national strategy.
Karin Prien, Germany's federal minister for education, family affairs, senior citizens, women and youth, said governments had struggled to keep pace with the influence of digital platforms.
"We have indeed seen the risks but often responded to rapid developments like deer caught in the headlights," Prien told AJP.
An expert commission established by Prien in September 2025 delivered 56 recommendations a year later, setting out responsibilities for technology companies, families, schools, healthcare providers and public authorities.
The German Cabinet adopted a framework on Oct. 14 supporting the exclusion of children under 13 from social networks and graduated protections for older teenagers.
Germany also plans public information campaigns for parents and more systematic media education, alongside measures intended to preserve young people's participation in digital life.
Yet a single age threshold is difficult to justify on developmental grounds, according to Mitch Prinstein, the John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"Some kids at 14 will be more ready than others at 18 years so it is hard for psychologists to recommend a specific age," he told AJP.
Differences in maturity complicate age-based restrictions, he argued. He identified sleep disruption as a particularly serious concern during adolescence and favored protections that could be eased gradually as young people mature.
For danah boyd, the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, the question is also social. Teenagers need opportunities to develop identities, form relationships and learn to participate in public life, she argued.
"When things are marked as age-restricted, they become especially appealing for teenagers who find sneaky ways to access the things that demarcate adulthood, whether that's alcohol or social media," boyd told AJP.
She urged policymakers to consider whether restrictions would achieve their intended aims and whether protections against harassment, deception and disinformation should extend to users of all ages.
Sinéad Gibney, an Irish Social Democrats lawmaker, raised a separate concern: how much personal information users would have to surrender to prove their age.
More rigorous verification could expose sensitive identifying information to governments, technology companies or intermediaries, she warned. Less intrusive methods, however, could prove easier to evade.
"If they are less effective and require less verification, they are easily circumvented," Gibney said.
That tension is shaping European efforts to verify age without compromising privacy.
"The model we support is privacy-preserving," Yon-Courtin said. "A certified third party, or the European digital identity wallet, confirms only whether a user is above the age threshold. No name, date of birth or document is shared with the platform."
Prien said Germany plans to introduce a national version of the European Digital Identity Wallet in 2027. The aim is to establish a user's eligibility without unnecessarily disclosing personal information to service providers.
Regulators also face a fundamental question of scope: applications with social features do not all serve the same purpose.
Rakuten Viber, which offers encrypted private messaging alongside public Communities and Channels, argued that rules should distinguish private communication from public content discovery.
"Private messaging lets children stay in touch with family and friends, classmates and teachers. A blanket age restriction could cut off that contact without addressing those risks," the company told AJP.
Viber said its private individual and group conversations use end-to-end encryption by default, while public spaces have separate moderation and access controls. In the Philippines, users must be at least 21 to join or create Communities and Channels. Dating and payment features are unavailable to users under 18.
Age checks should therefore reflect the risks of specific functions while preserving the confidentiality of private conversations, the company argued.
Beyond the legislative debate, Europe is testing how existing regulatory powers can address the influence of recommendation systems.
On Nov. 6, the European Commission said its preliminary findings showed that TikTok's personalized "For You" feed breached the Digital Services Act by creating a potentially harmful "rabbit hole effect." Regulators cited repeated recommendations involving sensitive topics, including mental health and body image. TikTok rejected the findings, which do not constitute a final ruling.
The Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms to assess systemic risks, mitigate them and undergo independent audits. It also gives qualified researchers access to certain platform data, opening the workings of these services to scrutiny beyond what companies voluntarily disclose. Serious infringements can attract fines of up to 6 percent of worldwide annual turnover.
Australian independent lawmaker Kate Chaney said such obligations carry weight only if oversight bodies can examine what companies actually do.
"One consistent problem in regulating social media is the information asymmetry between industry and government," Chaney told AJP.
She called for a digital duty of care requiring companies to identify and reduce foreseeable harm, backed by strong regulators and meaningful research access to information about algorithms and content moderation.
"For a regulator to enforce the rules against some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful companies, it needs significant funding, strong powers and a big enough stick to compel compliance," she said.
The question of accountability becomes more acute when digital evidence is needed to establish the circumstances of a child's death.
Ellen Roome, a British campaigner whose 14-year-old son Jools died in April 2022, said she discovered that his social media data had not been automatically preserved, leaving potentially relevant evidence vulnerable to deletion.
"Potentially vital digital evidence could simply disappear while parents, police and coroners were still trying to establish what had happened," Roome told AJP.
In July 2026, the High Court ordered a fresh inquest into Jools' death after an earlier proceeding had failed to examine potentially significant social media evidence. The decision did not establish that any online service caused his death.
Her campaign led to provisions widely known as Jools' Law in Britain's Crime and Policing Act 2026. Once brought into force, they will generally require senior coroners in England and Wales to notify regulator Ofcom within five working days of learning of the death of a child aged five to 17, subject to narrow exceptions.
That notification would trigger notices requiring relevant online services to preserve data for an initial six months, with extensions where necessary. Preservation would not automatically grant investigators or parents access to the material, which remains subject to separate procedures and privacy protections.
Roome argued that a record of a child's posts alone could not adequately reconstruct their online experience.
"It is not enough to know what a child posted. We need to understand what they were shown, what was recommended to them and why," she said.
She also called for procedures that spare bereaved families the burden of navigating technical and legal investigations themselves.
For South Korea, these international experiences carry a lesson beyond the choice of an age limit: effective protection requires rules whose impact can be assessed and regulators capable of holding platforms accountable for the experiences they shape.
"South Korea's choices will add weight to a global standard of child safety online," Yon-Courtin said.
"And a final lesson from our own experience: enforcement is everything. We are winning the battle of the texts, and we must not lose the battle on the ground," she added.
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