Meta, the company behind Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Threads, and WhatsApp, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly endorsed Greece’s proposal to establish a uniform age of adulthood across the European Union.
This initiative aims to protect children and teenagers from the harmful effects of social media.
Meta is the first major tech company to explicitly support Greece’s proposal at the European level. The Greek initiative focuses on safeguarding minors from harmful content and digital addiction through automatic digital age verification for young users. This solution is already implemented in Greece’s Kids Wallet application, and Meta has expressed support for adopting this age verification model across the EU.
“Greece is playing a leading role in this debate,” said Claudia Tribilino, Meta’s public policy officer for Italy, Greece, and Malta. She praised Greece’s contributions to recent EU-level consultations, which involved both Minister of Digital Governance Dimitris Papastergiou and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, along with his colleagues.
“I am pleased that Greece is taking 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 across the EU and recommend that these be widely applied to all digital services used by teenagers to ensure a safer online environment,” Tribilino stated in a LinkedIn post.
“We believe that a digital coming-of-age system is an effective solution to ensure teens have safe online experiences,” she added, noting that Meta’s decision marks a “particularly important step” in the company’s efforts to protect its younger users.
What Government Officials Say
Greek government officials emphasized that their proposal has gained significant traction due to efforts at the European level since the beginning of the year, following the presentation of the National Strategy for the Protection of Minors from Internet Addiction.
The momentum behind Greece’s position was evident last month when European Commission Vice-President for Technology Henna Virkkunen announced Brussels’ intention to introduce a “mini-wallet” with age verification capabilities in the summer, modeled after Greece’s Kids Wallet. This temporary solution aims to bridge the gap until the European digital wallet is fully implemented by the end of 2026.
The issue of protecting minors from online risks has been repeatedly highlighted as a priority by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who described it as one of the “regulatory battles” the EU must address. He raised the issue during his speech at the UN General Assembly in September.
Source: pagenews.gr