An expert panel delivered recommendations to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen setting out a framework that would require platforms to prove their services are safe before making them available to children. The reinstated rules known as Chat Control 1.0 apply only to unencrypted services and run until 2028, while a permanent regulation requiring platforms to scan for child sexual abuse material—Chat Control 2.0—remains deadlocked after five rounds of negotiations, with talks resuming in September. The central dispute is whether scanning can be extended to end-to-end encrypted communications; the panel notes that more than 80 percent of child sexual abuse investigations begin with reports from platforms, making the legal uncertainty a direct problem for investigators.
Proving that a service is safe for children requires demonstrating that harm can be intercepted before it reaches a target, rather than relying on post-incident reporting. Detection operating within direct messages—across encrypted and unencrypted channels on Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms—identifies grooming, sextortion and child sexual abuse material in real time without requiring platforms to break encryption or hold decrypted copies. The approach addresses the investigative dependency the European panel highlights: where 80 percent of abuse investigations originate from platform reports, blocking harmful contact at the point of communication and surfacing high-risk cases to the appropriate authority provides the evidentiary foundation for enforcement, independent of the encryption debate that has stalled the permanent regulatory framework.
