(de-news.net) – The German Ethics Council rejects a strict minimum age for social media, favoring a cross-platform, risk-based regulatory approach that extends to AI systems. The debate unfolds alongside growing concerns about youth exposure to digital harms, educational challenges in schools, shifting news consumption toward social media, and emerging human–AI behavioral dynamics.
The Council reaffirmed that digital platforms are crucial for fulfilling the communication and information needs of young people one week after having rejected a complete ban on social media for minors, thereby underscoring a continuity in its recent deliberative stance. The main difficulty, according to Council Chair Helmut Frister, is striking a balance between children’s and teenagers’ desires for participation in digital environments and empowerment on the one hand, and their protection and welfare on the other. As a result, and in light of this tension, the Council determined that the establishment of a legal minimum age for using social media would not constitute a suitable or sufficiently precise remedy for the identified challenges.
Rather, participants stated that digital spaces have to be updated and structurally adapted in order to better accommodate younger users in a sustainable and safety-oriented manner. Risks including algorithmic addiction, manipulation, cyberbullying, violent content, pornography, and extremism are not limited exclusively to social media platforms, according to council spokesperson and philosopher Judith Simon, but instead reflect broader systemic characteristics of contemporary digital ecosystems. She added that minors are using generative AI technologies such as chatbots and image generators with increasing frequency, which in turn raises comparable and overlapping concerns regarding exposure, influence, and behavioral dependency. Age-based limits, according to the Council’s assessment, therefore ignore these wider and cross-platform hazards and may unintentionally encourage young users to migrate toward alternative, potentially less regulated AI services.
As a result, the Council promoted a risk-based protection system that would apply consistently to both social media and other digital services, with safeguards calibrated according to the severity and likelihood of observed harms. The current provisions of the Digital Services Act were described as providing a structurally solid foundation, yet platform providers should, in the Council’s view, be held more accountable and enforcement mechanisms should be tightened in practical implementation. Simon also contended that Germany’s youth media laws require systematic updating and that protective frameworks for minors should be explicitly extended to encompass AI applications as well, reflecting technological convergence.
Teachers concerned as digital disruption and online harms spill into classrooms
The German Philologists’ Association, on the other hand, advocated for a more specific and operational plan to regulate social media use within classroom environments. Chair Susanne Lin-Klitzing stated that educators require operational stability and clear legal direction, particularly when addressing parental concerns, bullying incidents, and harmful online content affecting school settings. She stated that teachers frequently have to manage disruptive disinformation, addictive usage patterns, and forms of internet harassment directly within the instructional context, often without sufficient institutional support. As a result, the group called for an all-encompassing social response that would involve parents from the earliest stages of elementary education onward.
According to survey data gathered from 1,015 instructors in May and June of 2026, there is a general lack of confidence regarding social media use in school settings, indicating widespread uncertainty in educational practice. Eight percent of respondents said they felt overwhelmed, while approximately half reported feeling insecure in handling such issues. The most urgent worry among students was identified as excessive use and addictive behavior (79 percent), followed by smartphone distraction within the classroom environment (70 percent), and cyberbullying, sexting, hate speech, and misinformation (63 percent). Large majorities preferred established guidelines, practical advice, legal training, and, in certain situations, psychological support services, even though 40 percent indicated that they felt comfortable managing social media-related disputes when they arose.
Meanwhile, police issued further alerts over the so-called Blackout Challenge due to a case at a secondary school in Rhineland-Palatinate, highlighting ongoing concerns about imitation behavior. According to investigators, a 13-year-old is suspected of assaulting a 14-year-old classmate by choking him until he was rendered unconscious. Authorities emphasized that practices involving oxygen deprivation or strangulation can result in severe harm, including irreversible brain damage, and pointed out that such incidents have previously been linked to fatalities in comparable contexts.
Patterns of news consumption also show the increasing structural impact of digital channels on information behavior. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, 60% of Germans between the ages of 18 and 24 usually obtain their news from social media platforms, while 17% rely exclusively on them as their primary source. In comparison, 36% of people across all age groups use social media to access news content. The audience share of print media, radio, and traditional television continues to decline, particularly among younger users, reflecting an ongoing structural shift in media consumption. Younger respondents also exhibited lower levels of trust in news sources, alongside a general concern about distinguishing fact from fiction in digital environments. Even though they are used by only a small percentage of the population, AI chatbots are being adopted more frequently for tasks such as content summarization.
AI assistants like Siri and Alexa, according to Alfred Benedikt Brendel, are reshaping patterns of human behavior in subtle but measurable ways. Based on recent findings, he noted that when errors occur, users often verbally insult these systems, responding as if the assistants were human while simultaneously feeling fewer social constraints because of their non-human status. Similar incidents have also been reported in workplace environments, where employees deliberately impede robots—a practice that researchers describe as “robomobbing”—thereby illustrating emerging dynamics between human actors and automated systems in professional contexts.
Audio: TTSFree
