In a move that places the protection of childhood at the center of digital governance, the European Union's chief executive has proposed a continent-wide prohibition on social media accounts for children under 13. The measure seeks to replace a fragmented landscape of national rules with a single enforceable standard, confronting the accumulated harms — psychological, commercial, and algorithmic — that have followed young people into the digital world. It is, at its core, a question societies have long struggled to answer: where does the freedom of powerful systems end and the duty to protect