EU says Meta failed to stop under-13 users on Instagram and Facebook

The European Commission said on April 29 that it has preliminarily found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act because Instagram and Facebook did not do enough to stop children under 13 from using the platforms.

The case matters because it moves Europe’s platform rules from broad promises about child safety to a specific enforcement test: whether a large platform can actually enforce its own minimum-age policy. According to the Commission, Meta’s systems did not reliably prevent underage signups or quickly remove accounts once they were active.

The Commission’s summary points to a simple failure mode with large consequences. Children below 13 could reportedly enter a false birth date during signup and still create an account, while Meta’s controls were not strong enough to verify whether that self-declared age was accurate.

That may sound procedural, but it goes to the center of how the Digital Services Act works. The law does not just ask very large platforms to publish safety policies. It expects them to assess platform-level risks and put real mitigation systems in place, especially when minors are involved.

Meta now has a chance to review the file and respond before the case moves further. For the broader industry, the message is harder to miss: age gates that depend mostly on self-reporting are becoming much harder to defend when regulators can test whether they actually work.

As first detailed by the European Commission, the case could become an important benchmark for how regulators measure child-safety compliance on mainstream social platforms, not just niche services or adult sites.