STRASBOURG — European lawmakers Tuesday voted to ban online ads that target children, ramping up a crackdown on Big Tech platforms and their content moderation policies.
The proposed ban was included in a draft of the EU’s content moderation rulebook, the Digital Services Act, which the European Parliament’s internal market committee approved with a large majority of votes.
Parliament’s text, which is still up for negotiation in coming months, includes a line seeking to stop tech companies like Facebook, Google, TikTok and others from allowing businesses to target minors through their platforms.
The move is part of a broader push across Europe to impose age verification systems online so that children can’t access some platforms with content deemed harmful for them, including pornography.
“We want to protect minors using platforms,” Christel Schaldemose, the Danish Social Democrat lawmaker in charge of the file, told POLITICO.
She said the law still needed refining to make sure that identifying minors won’t compromise privacy rights, but added that “the platforms today already have actual knowledge about who minors are.”
Proposed by the European Commission a year ago, the Digital Services Act (DSA) aims to create Europe-wide rules for online platforms. The bill seeks to crack down on illegal content, regulate online advertising and impose transparency measures on platforms’ algorithms.
Banning targeted ads for children could become a thorny issue in future negotiations to finalize the law.