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BRUSSELS — If young Europeans soon find themselves kicked off social media they’ll have Ursula von der Leyen to thank.

Monday brings a key step in the European Commission president’s well-orchestrated push to enact an EU-wide social media ban for young people: the release of an expert report on the dangers of social media for minors.

Von der Leyen brought together child psychiatrist Jörg Fegert and social epidemiologist Maria Melchior to tell the EU how to best shield children from online harm, with months of input from dozens of other experts.

Yet the release of their report Monday isn’t really meant to convince von der Leyen that action is needed, nor that age restrictions are a good idea. As a medical doctor and a parent to seven grown children, she has already expressed her worry that social media is bad for young people and said some kind of EU-wide restrictions are necessary.

Von der Leyen could unveil plans for EU-wide age restrictions on social media as soon as September, four officials said, after POLITICO reported in March that the Commission’s tech department had already drafted a version of the law.

One EU official said Monday’s report is a way to convince any skeptical national governments to get on board and to provide “an evidence base” for any proposed ban.

Ursula von der Leyen gives her annual State of the Union address during a plenary session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on September 10, 2025 when she first announced the expert panel. | Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images

It’s the latest step by von der Leyen to take a personal stake in ensuring Europe follows the global movement toward social media bans. When she first announced the expert panel at last year’s State of the European Union address, it caught officials working on the matter by complete surprise, two EU officials told POLITICO.

Opponents of a blanket ban aren’t impressed by the process. “Usually it is better to explain the problem and find hopefully the best solution to the problem. If you have already said that we are going for a ban and we are looking for a way how to do it, then this is a little bit biased,” Estonian Justice and Digital Affairs Minister Liisa-Ly Pakosta told POLITICO.

Global wave

Australia became the first country to impose age restrictions for social platforms in December. Indonesia started enforcing a ban in March, with Malaysia following in June . Turkey’s parliament has greenlit a bill. France is the furthest along among EU countries, with the United Kingdom also forging ahead .

An EU-wide ban requires a far more difficult balancing act among 27 countries. Von der Leyen brought up the issue at last year’s State of the European Union address, an annual tradition where she sets out the EU executive’s policy aims for the year. The four officials said they expect an announcement with next steps at this year’s speech in September, as von der Leyen continues to build support across the bloc.

“We’ve seen that already 14 member states are on board,” Poland’s Digital Affairs Minister Dariusz Standerski told POLITICO. “I believe that we have now a strong majority in favor of those solutions. We’ve heard from a couple of countries which are not really happy about those proposals — however, I do not see any possible blocking minority right now.”

Standerski said more than 70 percent of the public in Poland supports a social media ban for children and age verification in light of some of the content that young people are exposed to. “Children about six, seven years, those kids are seeing harmful content — child pornography, bullying and other crimes on the internet,” he said.

Most of the public opposition is coming from a handful of more digital-savvy nations that insist there are smarter ways to protect children than a blanket ban.

Von der Leyen will make a short statement Monday and publicly accept the experts’ findings. One official who has seen the report told POLITICO that it will contain concrete recommendations about how to limit the harm done by social media but won’t go as far as to tell politicians what specifically should be banned.

Another official briefed on the contents said the report will not give a yes-or-no answer on whether age restrictions are a good idea. It will, however, leave the door open to such a measure, they said, as well as on at what ages limits should be set.

Many of the experts consulted by the panel don’t agree with a blanket social media ban, favoring a more nuanced approach that considers children’s rights. Several, including Leanda Barrington-Leach of the 5Rights Foundation and the London School of Economics’ Sonia Livingstone, wrote a letter addressed to von der Leyen a month ago to warn against blanket measures.

There are early signs that the new restrictions may not work as expected. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner said in March that the country’s ban has been largely ineffective in keeping kids off of social media, citing a lack of enforcement from Big Tech companies. The government is trying to increase the powers of the online safety regulator so that they can bring platforms in line.

Sørine Vesth Rasmussen, senior advisor on tech policy and children’s rights at Danish civil society group Børns Vilkår, who also contributed to the panel, told POLITICO that she expects the recommendations “to address protection and empowerment of minors taking a holistic perspective.”

Poland’s Digital Affairs Minister Dariusz Standerski, who said 70 percent of the Polish public supported a social media ban for children, at the European Parliament in Brussels in January 2025. | artin Bertrand/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

Capitals with a bone to pick

Von der Leyen’s strong support for a social media ban comes as multiple European countries are already moving at full speed with their own measures. France plans to impose age restrictions by September, while Denmark and Greece are aiming for measures by the end of the year. The Commission has given them the green light to go ahead.

Several key aspects of how an EU proposal could look remain unclear, such as whether Brussels will set an EU-wide age or let countries set their own.

Pressure on the Commission to do more to protect children online has been mounting since last summer when French President Emmanuel Macron made the issue a key part of his agenda . Von der Leyen has also faced pressure from capitals like Athens, Copenhagen and Madrid to do more to keep minors off social media.

“The highest level in Paris” has been pressing for more action, an official from an EU capital closely working on the matter told POLITICO.

Earlier this summer, the Commission hastily announced a technical solution to check users’ age online — just in time for an EU leaders’ call on the topic organized by Macron. The tool was later found to have security flaws, which the Commission claims to have fixed.

The EU executive told Paris earlier this week that it can go ahead with setting its own minimum age of social media, so long as it doesn’t include requirements that wade into the Commission’s oversight responsibility for tech companies.

EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen has hinted that she doesn’t see social media bans as a panacea. “The first priority to make it safe for everybody, and especially for minors, because [the] online environment is very important part of our everyday life,” she told reporters earlier this year.

But given the actions of multiple governments, should the EU fail to take measures, Virkkunen and her team have also come to understand that the only way to avoid fragmentation is to push forward with EU measures.

“We must minimize fragmentation of national systems that may create legal uncertainty or weaken enforcement,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told POLITICO.

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Zero Parades has a free to play TTRPG

It adapts the game's setting and mechanics for pen and paper

It also comes with a free premade one shot to help you learn the game

Let’s face it, 2026 — with its component price hikes , sweeping layoffs , cancellations, expensive AAA titles , and Sony’s promise to stop making physical games — has been something of a year of Ls. But one of the few lights in this darkness, and game of the year contender, Zero Parades for Dead Spies just announced brand new content is dropping: it’s a tabletop version of its gameplay, and it’s totally free.

If you head over to zeroparades.com/one-shot you’ll find everything you need to get started including a simple core rulebook and a One Shot story set in the Zero Parades world 30 years before the events of the game.

The One Shot comes with everything you need to play your first session including location maps, premade characters, GM materials (to help whoever is running things) and adapted rules that bring the game’s mechanics to life in TTRPG form.

Scratching the itch

Anyone who has played Zero Parades for Dead Spies or its spiritual predecessor Disco Elysium will have already felt the TTRPG inspired elements — all challenges in the games are already presented as dice rolls.

Just like in Zero Parades the pen and paper game has the same stats and Faculties — Action, Relation, Intellect — which determine how capable your character should be at certain actions, as well as details on how you can exert yourself to increase your odds of success — at the cost of raising your Fatigue, Anxiety, or Delirium respectively.

You also find items of clothing you can equip to make your stats better (and sometimes also worse), or tools which unlock actions like a camera allowing you to snap photos to use later — or to remember a sick spy moment you just pulled off, the decision is all yours.

As a major fan of both TTRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons and of Zero Parades I had been thinking of adapting the digital gameplay into something pen and paper for my regular playgroup. With this free release I don’t need to do any work at all — though I love there are the resources to create your own adventure and stories if you want to move away form the premade One Shot.

(Image credit: ZA/UM) Zero Parades for Dead Spies is everything you’d want from a follow-up to Disco Elysium . It keeps the post-Soviet vibes and aesthetics with a whole new story and setting. The gameplay is very similar too, with a few updates that fine-tune mechanics in a way that feels better and yet utterly familiar.

There’s also that general and gradually growing weirdness that made Disco Elysium so much of a joy to play through.

So many people I know who loved Disco Elysium had no clue Zero Parades is a thing they can play, and the perfect game to scratch the itch Disco Elysium leaves you with.

Plus if you’re reading this article the day it comes out the full Zero Parades for Dead Spies game is 10%-off for everyone, and 20% off for owners of Disco Elysium in the Steam Summer Sale. What are you waiting for? Go and play it!

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This week, NATO leaders gathered in Ankara — giving President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a powerful stage at a moment when Turkey’s strategic value to Europe is rising.

Sarah Wheaton speaks to Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, about Erdoğan’s moment at this week’s NATO summit, Turkey’s complicated relationship with Europe and the United States, and whether the EU can build a serious partnership with Ankara while still confronting its crackdown on political opposition and free media.

Then, author and POLITICO contributor John Kampfner joins the show to discuss his new book, “Braver New World” — and what Europe can learn from places that have found unusually good answers to big problems, from Vienna’s housing model to Finland’s schools and Estonia’s digital state.

And since we’re book nerds, we’d love to hear your recommendations for summer reads; we’ll feature some of them in a future episode. Send us a voice note or message us on WhatsApp here , or at +32 491 05 06 29. You can also email us at podcast@politico.eu .

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Before Palworld’s Early Access debut in 2024, I remember eagerly wanting to review the completely unhinged-looking “Pokemon with guns” game, mostly as a joke. Hilariously, the joke was on me when it not only became one of the biggest games of the year, but also one of my all-time favorite survival games . With its 1.0 update now finally at-hand over two years later, I was quite excited to jump back into this strange, sometimes-oddly-dark creature collector. Though I’m only a dozen hours into a fresh playthrough of the 1.0 version, so far it has improved in all the ways I hoped it would after sinking so much time into its earliest incarnation. Most of the technical rough edges have been smoothed over, progression has been smartly streamlined, and loads of missing bits and baubles have been added, like a fully realized story with NPCs to chat with and quest lines to complete – not to mention a proper ending to that story, which I am hungry to reach before I put a final score on this review.

If you’ve never played Palworld before, then there’s very little I can say to prepare you for this completely bizarre adventure. You’ll recruit a roster of colorful critters who make Nintendo’s legal team furious to perform unpaid labor in your work camps as you explore an increasingly dangerous world filled with gun-toting maniacs. This mix of creature collecting, open-world exploration, RPG-adjacent leveling and questing, and survival mechanics that have you building up a base to store your pals and conquer the wilds probably shouldn’t work. But it really does. And with 1.0 expanding on the fundamentals to flesh out the world and the kinds of activities you tackle within it, that over-the-top adventure is more compelling than it’s ever been.

For starters, there are now comprehensible reasons for your character to be doing the things they are doing – an actual storyline to accompany the climb from “naked barbarian with a stick” to “industrial sweatshop proprietor with godlike power.” NPCs will send you on missions and direct you toward the next set of meaningful activities to pursue. Most of those activities ask you to travel deeper into a dangerous island world dominated by wild creatures and psychotic human factions, and it’s been fun to get to know some of the friendly and unfriendly faces along the way (especially compared to Early Access, where you were just fighting them with no explanation). That said, I haven’t seen enough of the story to know if it’s all that good yet, and would describe the first hours as being passable. It’s nice context for what I’m doing at least, but time will tell if it becomes something I’m genuinely excited to see more of or just stay as decent set dressing for the overall goofiness.

The biggest difference since the last time I played is, without question, all of the various performance improvements and bug fixes as the issues used to be rampant – to the point where the Xbox version was initially almost unplayable at times. I’m still early on, and the most egregious stuff didn’t rear its ugly head until late in the journey, but at least so far it's been much more stable. Framerates are still a bit jittery at times, but nowhere near the extent they once were, and those hiccups haven’t come anywhere close to mucking up the experience, whereas they used to be a fairly regular annoyance.

Another big improvement is the progression system, which previously felt quite uneven and grindy at times. The pace in these early hours has been much cleaner, pushing me into the action faster and pointing me toward clear objectives that got me out of my bases to explore, fight bosses, and capture pals more quickly. Of course, this is also now my third time playing through this stretch of Palworld, so it’s possible that my familiarity with these opening hours has more to do with it than anything else. I’ll have a better sense of how much progression has actually improved once I get into the huge stretches of new territory I haven’t seen yet and need to figure things out for the first time.

I’m still quite early in my 1.0 Palworld adventure, but I’ve instantly remembered why I was so captivated by this hodgepodge of ideas. I’ve got plenty more to work my way through, a whole bunch of new Pals to collect (that I’ve only just started to see pop up here and there), and who knows what else in store. This is a big update with a lot of game to get through, so I’ll update this review as I get deeper in, and then have a final score in the coming weeks.