With governments across the world trying to safeguard children from the dangers of social media, the EU is tightening its grip on the social media companies and will be targeting “addictive design” elements on TikTok and Instagram in particular.

Some of the features on social media platforms will be addressed in the region later in the year, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday at the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children in Denmark.

CNBC has approached ByteDance and Meta for comment.

“We are working to ban TikTok and stop its addictive features – endless scroll, autoplay, and shoving new content at you. The same goes for Meta: Instagram and Facebook are not doing enough to protect themselves from under-13 users,” Von der Leyen said. 

“We’re exploring ways that kids can be directed to go through ‘rabbit holes’ of harmful material, like videos about eating disorders or self-harm,” she continued.

The EU’s executive arm has also developed its own age verification app, which has the “highest privacy standards in the world,” according to Von der Leyen.

It will be added to the digital wallet of member states shortly, and can be easily adopted by online platforms. The EU chief said that “no more excuses – the technology for age-verification is available”.

The EU Commission could have a legal proposal prepared as soon as the summer, as it awaits the advice and findings of its ‘Special Panel of experts on Child Safety Online.’

U.S. crackdown

The EU has been taking action against U.S Big Tech in the past year as it implements measures that would increase the accountability of the tech giants. A string of fines has attracted criticism from U.S. officials who have issued warnings that the bloc could be losing out on being a part of the AI economy.

U.S. President Donald Trump is combating the penalties against U.S. businesses, which have totalled over $7 billion in the past two years.

Fines are threatened for those who have been accused of breaching the bloc’s antitrust and competition legislation, including Apple, Meta and Google.

In February, Trump signed a memorandum on the matter that would look into “fines, practices and policies that foreign governments impose on American companies” as “digital services taxes (DSTs)” to fight them.

Earlier this year, the EU Commission launched an investigation against Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, for the spreading of sexually explicit non-consensual content of women and children generated by its chatbot Grok.

The legal action against social media platforms over child safety issues follows a landmark court case in the U.S. in March that concluded that features like infinite scrolling and auto-playing videos were responsible for mental health harms and addiction in teens.

The Commission recently determined that Meta violated the EU Digital Services Act by not preventing children under 13 years old from accessing its services, and after a preliminary investigation, concluded that children are “easily able to navigate around checks”.

Tightening a social ban on under-16s is also a growing trend across the globe, with Australia being the first nation to implement a comprehensive ban in December. In fact, a few European nations, such as Spain, France and the U.K., are introducing their own child social media blocking bills.