The EU wants to recruit an army of “schoolyard guardians” to raise awareness of the world’s first laws to fight online harms including child sexual abuse and content featuring eating disorders and suicide, the Guardian has learned.
The EU commissioner Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the laws that came into force last month, is preparing ambitious plans to make sure children, parents and teachers know how to report content that is now not only harmful but illegal.
“We want to make sure that in every single educational [establishment] there is one person who can explain to the whole community, including the students, what is happening,” Breton told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.
He wanted every schoolchild and parent, he added, to know that “what is illegal in the school yard, is illegal also on social networks.”
Under the Digital Services Act (DSA), 19 online giants including Facebook, X, Google and TikTok are forced to better police the content they deliver and remove algorithms that feed endless inappropriate content to children.
For the last three weeks, networks including X, formerly known as Twitter, have displayed a specific line in their reporting menu showing users how to “report illegal EU content”.
The platforms have 24 hours to respond to reports of suspected law breaking, and if they fail to offer a satisfactory remedy a user can report them directly to an appointed “trusted flagger” at their national regulatory body whose review must be treated as a “matter of priority” by the tech firm. In the event of a legal dispute, complainants will be able to go to court to assert their new legal rights under the DSA.
But one of the challenges the European Commission faces is building awareness of the laws to ensure children remain in a safe digital space when in their bedrooms or away from the gaze of their parents or teachers.
“We are only three weeks in, so this is work in progress, but this is exactly what we want to do, to identify immediately that we need to have dedicated specific woman and men … who will be the trusted flaggers, or dedicated bodies” that will be tasked with enforcing the DSA, said Breton.
“It is extremely important now to help to educate the whole educational system, where there is daily contact with the children, and also with the parents, but also with the teachers,” added Breton, who pushed through the laws against stiff opposition from the tech companies who, he said, wanted to stop the proposals in their tracks.
“I have to be honest, it has been a big, big fight,” he said. “At the beginning, when I started this, I had almost everyone against me. Some member states, including the biggest of them – you can imagine who it is – were not happy. The US was not happy that we were doing this. All the platforms, each of them, tried to lobby me; they were trying to lobby everyone to stop us.
“But I said, ‘no, we have to do what we have to do’. We thought it was our responsibility to [regulate], finally.
“This a quantum leap [from] the way it was before,” he added.
The grassroots campaign to recruit “schoolyard guardians” will be one of the biggest ever undertaken by the EU. Eurostat, the EU’s data agency, puts the number of children in secondary school at 36 million with another 24 million in primary school, many of whom will be exposed to social media from an early age.
No price tag has been put on the exercise but it is expected that the 27 member states will incorporate the initiative into their national discourse in the same way as they have done in the past with road safety campaigns.
Breton, considered one of the most powerful commissioners in Brussels, hopes the threat of a fine of up to 6% of global revenue or a total ban from operation in the EU will prove enough of an incentive to ensure they observe their new legal duties.
There were already positive signs some of the social giants would comply, he said. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has told him it has recruited 1,000 people specifically to shepherd others and establish compliance with the DSA.
“My biggest hope, of course, is that we don’t need to sanction. But the sanctions are here to be applied, when needed. I will not hesitate to do that, because I have received this power to enforce from our legislators, and I will apply it,” he warned.
Breton is keen to stress that the companies will also have to maintain freedom of expression and have processes in place to assess content based on legal duties rather than political or personal interests.
The commissioner is now in the process of meeting education ministers from member states and has already engaged with judges across Europe to explain the new law in an effort to ensure the courts system offers robust recourse to victims.
“It is very important now to make sure we educate all the stakeholders, the justice departments, education departments, parents and, of course, the education system.”
Breton says the DSA will “chase” down criminals behind some of the most egregious online content, including child sexual abuse and material interfering with elections. The EU will be relying on tech companies but also users to flag any disinformation or fake news, with two test cases on the horizon in the form of elections in Slovakia and Poland in the next few weeks.
Breton acknowledged that state agents behind disinformation could prove to be beyond the reach of the new EU laws. But he said more legislation would be proposed if needed: “We will use the DSA and if it needs to be adjusted we will do it.”
The EU’s laws will not apply to the UK or to Northern Ireland, despite the special Brexit trading arrangements, an official confirmed.
However, it is likely that each of the 40 companies that have signed up to comply with the DSA will take a cross-continent approach, particularly with the UK’s own online safety bill about to become law.
Breton, who holds multiple portfolios including critical raw materials, the internal market, cybersecurity and climate neutrality, was recently reported by Politico to be nursing ambitions to succeed Ursula von der Leyen as president of the commission.
Asked if he had designs on the top job, the Frenchman told the Guardian he was happy where he was. “I am very zen [about the future],” he said, before adding, enigmatically: “I learned in my life to never ask myself a question where there is no answer.”
