BERN. Switzerland will regulate social media platforms without banning them for anyone. The Federal Council has strengthened its planned Act on Communication Platforms after a consultation that pulled in both directions, adding tougher protection for children and teenagers, wider reporting duties and faster takedown obligations. The dispatch goes to parliament by June 2027.
The revised bill requires platforms to assess the risks their services pose to minors, to design default settings accordingly, to offer simple reporting channels and to remove manifestly illegal content quickly. Transparency obligations, which compel regular public reports on moderation and complaints, have been extended to cover more services than the first draft proposed. An enforcement office with sanction powers sits at the centre of the scheme.
Equally notable is what the bill refuses to do. There is no general prohibition on social media for under-16s of the kind Australia has introduced, and no blanket age verification at the login screen. The government cites proportionality and data protection: verifying every user’s age means collecting identity data from everyone, a cure it judges worse than the disease, and one that sits awkwardly beside the data protection revision now in its final drafting stage.
A consultation that cut both ways
The consultation responses explain the compromise. Child protection organisations and several cantons demanded hard age limits and accused the government of regulating yesterday’s internet; the platforms and business associations warned of a surveillance architecture and urged alignment with the European Union’s Digital Services Act instead. The Federal Council chose the Brussels-shaped middle: duties for operators, rights for users, and no bans.
Alignment with the EU is not incidental. Swiss teenagers scroll the same feeds as European ones, and a regulatory island would either exempt Switzerland from the platforms’ safety systems or push the platforms to apply European rules here without Swiss input. The bill borrows the architecture of the Digital Services Act so that Swiss complaints flow into machinery that already exists.
What parliament will fight over
The battle now moves to the committees in Bern. The left wants statutory age limits and liability for recommendation algorithms; the right wants parental responsibility and warns against a federal speech police; the centre holds the bill’s fate, as it does on most files this term. The size of the fines, the reach of the enforcement office and the legal definition of a minor in a world of thirteen-year-old influencers will fill the next year of hearings. The platforms, which face outright bans in other capitals, are unlikely to fight the Swiss version hard.