Supporters of Greece’s position on the introduction of a single age of adulthood in the European Union, to protect children and teenagers from the harmful side of social media, advocated today, Meta of Mark Zuckerberg, which includes Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Threads, and WhatsApp.

The Metabecomes the first of the big tech companies to take an explicit stance on this issue, supporting the Greek proposal at the European level. The Greek side seeks to protect minors from harmful content and digital addiction. The Greek project is based on the idea of automatic digital age verification of the young user, a solution already integrated in the Greek application Kids Wallet, with Metastating that it accepts this age verification model horizontally across the EU.

“Greece is playing a leading role in the debate.“

Meta’s public policy officer Metaon Italy, Greece and Malta, Claudia Tribilino, specifically welcomed the role that Greece has played in the consultations that have taken place at European level in recent months, in which both the Minister of Digital Governance Dimitris Papastergiou and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his colleagues have been directly involved.

“I am pleased that Greece is playing a leading role in the vital debate among EU Member States and in the process leading to the non-paper ‘Protecting minors from online risks and harm”. We support the call for the European Commission to implement mandatory, embedded age verification measures in the EU and recommend that it be widely implemented across all digital services used by teenagers, to ensure a safer online environment for all“, said in a LinkedIn post by Ms Tribilino.

“We believe that digital coming of age is an effective solution to ensure that teens have safe online experiences,” she added, adding that this decision by Meta is another “particularly important step” in the company’s efforts to protect their betas.

What government officials say

Government officials stressed that the Greek proposal has gained ground thanks to the effort made at the European level since the beginning of the year, i.e., immediately after the presentation of the National Strategy for the Protection of Minors from Internet Addiction

The momentum of the Greek positions was seen last month, when the European Commission’s vice-president responsible for technology Hena Virkunen expressed the intention Brussels to introduce in the summer ““mini” wallet” with age confirmation facility, along the lines of the Greek Kids Wallet, to “bridge” the gap until the European digital wallet is ready at the end of 2026.

The issue of protecting minors from risks in the age of the internet has been repeatedly put forward as a priority by Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who has said it is one of the “regulatory battles” that the EU must fight, and he raised it during his speech to the UN General Assembly last September.