Meta Announces Support for Teen Online Safety Bills

An announcement that comes just today from Meta, the international social network giant. “We want to give our public support, as a large international company that deals with technology,” Angelo Mazzetti (Director of Public Policy of Meta for Italy, Greece, Malta and Cyprus) tells Foglio, “to proposals that intend to establish an age of awareness beyond which one can use digital tools and services independently, and below which instead a parental control and a sort of authorization from the same should be necessary to use them. We have called it 'digital age of majority'; in fact we see that the debate on the safety of teenagers online – in addition to some legislative proposals in many European and non-European countries – is going in this direction”. It is not a question of imposing a ban on access under a certain age, says Mazzetti: "As before the age of eighteen, in general, you need parental consent or supervision for some activities, as far as the web is concerned, it is a question of offering a tool for choice, awareness and greater control to parents who, perhaps even through dialogue with the child, can decide how to calibrate the use of digital tools". The parents' concern has not only been perceptible for some time, but has also led to requests for urgent intervention. Mazzetti cites a Morning Consult survey of European families (the Italian data is emblematic: 8 out of 10 parents are in favor of management systems at the app store level to approve the download of apps by minors under 16), and says: “If we go in this direction, the measures should be applied uniformly at least at the European level, to avoid further fragmentation in an already fragmented framework. And there should be no discrimination between types of services. Let me explain: you can’t apply the digital age of majority only for streaming or only for social media. You have to apply it to all digital services. There is statistical evidence that teenagers use about 40 apps a week: imposing a digital age of majority law only on one category of apps would not lead to results”. Last but not least: “To establish a digital age threshold, you need to know the age of the person, so you need verification systems,” says Mazzetti: “As Meta, we have asked that these systems be used and imposed in a uniform and mandatory way at a European level. And we ask that the age verification be done only once upstream, at the operating system or app-store level, not every time for every app downloaded.” Meta’s announcement is not something that comes out of the blue. “We have been thinking about the safety of minors for a long time, and our commitment is not just made of words,” says Mazzetti: “Meta was the only company to have created specific accounts for teenagers, launched about a year ago.” However, there are parents who allow their children to create accounts with fake ages as adults, perhaps also due to a lack of knowledge of the possibility of doing otherwise. “In the absence of specific regulatory indications,” says Mazzetti, “we have acted in this direction. First: we ask for the age when registering and creating the account, an age that cannot be changed by recreating the account. Second: we are testing and strengthening an artificial intelligence system that can understand a person's behavior starting from some signals, to be able to notice if the account is owned by a minor who declares a different age. Ensuring that minors have an adequate experience when using digital tools is a priority for us, for society and for politics.” In Europe, Australia, and Italy, they are working on legislative proposals in this direction. “Precisely given the social responsibility that the company has,” says Mazzetti, “we have decided to announce our support for this type of proposal. The hope is to bring the issue to the center of the debate and help parents broaden their awareness, to be able to make informed decisions about the teenager in their home, whose habits, level of maturity and social context they know.” With respect to the international framework, says Mazzetti, “the idea is to support the efforts of some countries to reach a common and harmonized solution at European level, to avoid discrimination and ineffective collages”. In the meantime, since September 2024, Meta has moved 54 million teenagers worldwide to teenager accounts. Digital adulthood is the next step.

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