EU Orders Capitals To Wait A Year Before Banning Social Media
Brussels asks member states to pause national restrictions on minors while Europe negotiates one beautifully complicated rulebook.
BRUSSELS, The European Commission has told member states to suspend their national plans to restrict minors’ access to social media for 12 months. Europe will use the time to agree on one rulebook and, ideally, several hundred definitions of “minor”.
Austria objected, having apparently learned that a national ban loses some of its force when stored in a continental cupboard marked “Please Do Not Open Until 2027”. Elsewhere, officials welcomed the delay. Several had already started printing leaflets in six languages, all in one carefully neutral shade of blue.
“This is a major step towards harmonisation,” said Liesel Quarn, deputy coordinator at the Commission’s Temporary Office for Permanent Arrangements. “For one year, every country will be free to do exactly the same thing: wait for us to tell it what it has already decided.”
“Every country will be free to do exactly the same thing: wait.”
Under the plan taking shape, national restrictions will remain in storage while talks continue on EU-wide rules. The laws have not been cancelled. Experts said they would be placed in padded envelopes and watched for independent movement.
There is, at present, no timetable. A draft timetable seen by nobody because it has not yet been drafted is expected to include a consultation period, followed by an impact assessment. Committees will then take a short recess to decide whether a child using a phone is a child, a user, or a small cross-border regulatory incident.
The invented European Bureau of Digital Patience called the pause “a victory for consistency, provided nobody checks what consistency means”. Its director, Pavel Murn, said the bureau had assembled a central database of national approaches, from “ban it” to “restrict it”, plus the familiar instruction to ask the family to have a conversation.
Social media platforms have watched from a safe distance. They are understood to be refreshing a page marked “EU harmonisation: loading”. Parents have been told the existing patchwork will stay in place while Europe searches for a single solution, a process expected to conclude shortly after everyone agrees on the font.
By next year, officials hope to produce a common framework for the bloc without creating 27 fresh exceptions. They would also prefer to avoid 54 review panels and an emergency summit devoted entirely to whether an app icon counts as an invitation. Until then, member states have been asked to pause their bans and wait patiently for the ban they can all share.