Ilona Dąbrowska, a media studies expert at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, told Poland's PAP news agency that Polish law cannot keep children safe from the many risks they face on social media.
She was commenting on new Australian rules that bar users under 16 from using social platforms.
Australia has become the first country in the world to introduce a blanket ban on social media for under-16s.
Malaysia plans to follow with similar restrictions, most likely in 2026.
In Europe, the European Parliament adopted a resolution in November expressing concern about the impact of online activity on the physical and mental health of minors.
The document suggests that access to social media, video platforms and artificial-intelligence virtual assistants, such as ChatGPT, should generally be limited to users aged 16 and over, or to 13-year-olds with parental consent.
Public opinion appears to support tougher rules.
According to the Eurobarometer survey “State of the Digital Decade 2025,” more than nine in 10 Europeans believe public authorities urgently need to act to protect children from the negative effects of social media.
Some 93 percent of respondents say social platforms are harmful to children’s mental health, 92 percent believe young users are exposed to cyberbullying and harassment, and the same share want effective tools to limit access to age-inappropriate content.
If such rules were introduced across the European Union, they would affect young users in Poland, where teenagers are already heavy social media users.
A report by the NASK National Research Institute, titled "Teenagers 3.0," finds that each Polish teenager has on average around six social media accounts.
The most popular apps among them include Messenger, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
The survey, published on September 29, also shows that Polish teenagers spend on average 3 hours and 23 minutes a day on social media.
“In its current form, Polish law is not able to protect children from potential threats, and there are very many of these,” Dąbrowska said.
She added that modern parents face a serious challenge if they want to limit their children’s exposure to dangerous content. Parental control tools installed on phones or computers can help, she said, but many children quickly learn how to bypass such restrictions.
Opponents of strict age limits argue that bans on social media for minors could be seen as a violation of young people’s digital freedom.
Dąbrowska disagrees. “I would not share the view that a ban on social media for children is a restriction of their freedom. Above all, it is protection from danger,” she said.
She pointed to rising youth suicide figures as one of the arguments for tighter regulation. In her view, easy and uncontrolled access to online content, combined with a lack of adequate support from adults, may contribute indirectly to these tragedies.
Children and teenagers are often not prepared to cope on their own with pressure, cyberbullying or toxic material online, she said, so clear rules on access can play an important preventive role.
According to data from the National Police Headquarters, 127 children aged between 7 and 18 died by suicide in Poland in 2024.
A separate study published in November by the NGO Dbam o Mój Zasięg (I Care About My Reach) and Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego, a state-owned development bank, found that content related to self-harm or suicide appears in social media feeds of 40 percent of seventh-grade primary school students and 50 percent of third-grade upper-secondary students.
“For children and young people, protection from what can happen when access to the internet is neither checked nor regulated is no longer a matter of choice, it is a necessity,” Dąbrowska said.
She also criticized the way platforms check users’ ages. “Until now, social media platforms have not verified the age of young users in a sufficiently thorough way. We have often heard that children as young as 10 already have their own accounts,” she said.
Most platforms set 13 as the minimum age for opening an account.
This limit follows the American Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA, and in Europe from the General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union’s main data protection law, which is applied in Poland as well.
Facebook, for example, allows users to register from the age of 13, although in some regions users may have to confirm their age, for instance by submitting an identity document.
“At this point a question arises about how far social media services should be allowed to see such documents,” Dąbrowska said. “Today’s internet is an architecture of algorithms in which privacy has become a commodity.”
Katarzyna Szymielewicz, CEO of the privacy and online safety NGO Panoptykon Foundation, welcomed the growing recognition that current Polish laws failed to protect children online, and commented further that the debate must not stop at age limits and parental controls.
"As long as social media platforms are built on pervasive surveillance, addictive design and profiling-based advertising that treat children’s attention and data as raw material, tightening formal access rules will be little more than a cosmetic fix," she said.
"Lawmakers in Poland and across the European Union must introduce strict limits on tracking and profiling minors, open platform algorithms to independent scrutiny and give regulators real enforcement powers so that big tech, not families alone, carries responsibility for making the digital environment safer," she added.
Panoptykon, which has lobbied against online surveillance for 16 years, works closely with regulators and civil society.
"Market regulators in Poland and across the European Union must enforce strict limits on the tracking and profiling of minors, and use their powers to scrutinize platforms' algorithms and eradicate addictive design from online platforms, social media in particular," Szymielewicz said.
"It is high time big tech, not families alone, carry responsibility for making the digital environment safer," she appealed.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP
Use audio player above to hear a report by Michał Owczarek.