Road to the State of the European Union – Policy Wishlist Series III
Giulia Torchio
Safety By Design as the Golden Standard
WISH: Ensure that only digital products and services that are pre-certified as safe can reach children across the European Union
For too long, tech companies have deflected government intervention by arguing that their social cost should be weighed against promises of future benefits. As this myth of exceptionalism took root, providers of digital services and products convinced regulators that “micro-level” harms would eventually be offset by yet-to-be-realised greater societal benefits.
Today, over a decade of research, court disputes, and legal settlements tell a different story: harm was never collateral, but systematically manufactured. Those same digital services and products sold as a getaway to a better version of the future turned out to be engineered to profile and exploit users in the name of financial profit.
Confronted with the current extent of online harm, regulators have finally started taking action, addressing the systematic risk assessments of major platforms’ design through federal trials in the U.S. and enforcement of the digital services act (DSA) in Europe, among others. And while tougher enforcement has certainly helped expose the cracks in Silicon Valley’s exceptionalism myth, intervening after harms occur is not enough on its own to make children safer online.
What is needed is a radical extension of product safety regulations to cover digital services and products available to children. More concretely, this means holding tech companies accountable through legally enforceable pre-certification: a product or service impacting children should only be placed on the single market once it has passed a safety assessment.
This is neither a far-fetched scenario nor an unreasonable burden to demand of regulators, since it is already the standard in other industries such as automotive, textile, and pharmaceutical. This approach also has the added benefit of being easy to operationalise, simply by issuing a list of non-compliant features and functionalities, restricted based on their age appropriateness.
Holding digital products and services to the same precautionary standard as physical ones is not radical. This is a long-overdue alignment with fundamental public safety principles: one we must make now, if we want to offer our children the opportunity to live in a digital world that is safe by design.
Giulia Torchio is the EU Affairs Officer at 5Rights Foundation, where she works on child online safety, with a specific focus on regulating digital services and products, age-appropriate design, and age assurance. Before joining 5Rights in early 2026, she was a Policy Analyst at the European Policy Centre, working on digital governance, innovation, and digital skills and competencies.
This blog post appeared on Social Media Ban for Kids, an interactive website managed by The Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based think tank, to gather available evidence and data points on the social media ban for children. Its website is https://socialmediaban.lisboncouncil.net/.