Recital 21

The features and functionalities which are considered to pose a risk to the privacy, safety and security of minors below the age of 15 correspond to globally recognised classifications of online risks, including exposure of minors to age-inappropriate content or contacts as well as harmful conducts of other users or other commercial or cross-cutting risks such as excessive use. These therefore include features and functionalities that enable certain harmful content consumption and dissemination as well as harmful interactions or behaviour. In particular, services enabling recipients to disseminate content in real-time to an indeterminate number of people expose minors to risks for their privacy as well as to inappropriate content, such as pornographic content; enabling minors to interact with unknown users exposes them to risks of inappropriate contact by adults but also of abusive or other harmful conducts by other users; automatically suggesting content or contacts expose minors to the risk of being exposed to harmful content or so-called “rabbit-holes” of harmful content, as well as entering into potentially harmful contacts with malicious users; deploying functionalities, interface designs or characteristics that can lead to compulsive or excessive use, such as push notifications or endless content feeds, expose the minor to risks of developing behaviours that harm their mental health and wellbeing, including addictive behaviours. These functionalities are typically offered only to recipients of the service that access the service by means of an account. It is therefore proportionate, taking into account the minor’s right to freedom of expression, to delay access to the service at the point of creation and use of such accounts, as the use of the same service without an account poses a lower risk to minors.