Redacción Aquí Europa
Spain, France, and Greece have presented a joint proposal to establish a minimum age for accessing social media within the European Union.
The three countries presented the measure, to which EFE had access, ahead of the next meeting of telecommunications ministers to be held in Luxembourg on June 6.
In the document, the Spanish Minister of Digital Transformation, Oscar López; the French Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digitalization, Clara Chappaz; and the Greek Minister of Digitalization, Dimitris Papastergiou, do not propose what that minimum age should be, pending the development of the debate among European partners, diplomatic sources explained.
The main objective is to protect minors and create mandatory mechanisms in the European Union that allow for age verification of users, as well as parental control software for all internet-enabled devices on the market.
They also propose the establishment of European standards requiring age-appropriate designs, “thus minimizing addictive and persuasive architectures, such as pop-up windows, profile customization, or automatic video playback.”
Concern about children and young people’s use of mobile devices has been present in recent years due to the problems not only affecting their mental health but also affecting classroom coexistence.
Last March, the Government approved in its Council of Ministers the requirement that educational centers expressly regulate the use of mobile and digital devices in the classroom and in the extracurricular activities they offer, always respecting the applicable regional regulations in each case.
For its part, the Community of Madrid also announced that for the next academic year it will eliminate individual use of mobile phones by students in Early Childhood and Primary Education, while many schools have already unilaterally banned it.