For years, Europe has regulated social networks built elsewhere. Now the Commission wants to try funding an alternative. With a €1.48 million call, Brussels has launched a pilot project to design and test new social platforms aimed at young people, built around safety, mental health, privacy, and user autonomy. The stated goal is to arrive at at least one service based on open protocols and capable of offering users greater choice over where to store their data, how to moderate content, and which applications to use to connect.
The figure is small compared to the billions invested by Meta, TikTok, or Google, and should not be framed as the imminent birth of a European competitor on a global scale. The significance is different: the Union wants to test whether certain principles currently enforced through the Digital Services Act can be embedded directly into a product's design.
Regulating an existing product is different from building a new one
When Brussels requires a major platform to reduce systemic risks, that platform must modify an architecture built for other goals: engagement, growth, and monetization. A project built from scratch can instead choose different metrics, more protective default settings, and a data structure less dependent on behavioral advertising.
This is the gamble of the pilot: not proving that Europe can replace Instagram with €1.48 million, but producing prototypes and standards that tangibly demonstrate how a social network designed around different priorities could work.
Young people must participate in the design
The Commission specifies that young people from different countries and backgrounds must be involved in defining and developing the features. This is a crucial element, as many online safety policies are designed by adults without verifying how youth actually use the platforms.
Involving users does not automatically resolve conflicts between safety and freedom, but it can prevent abstract solutions. A system designed to protect minors that turns out to be overly invasive or paternalistic simply risks being bypassed.
The open protocol is the most ambitious part
The call explicitly refers to at least one protocol-based service. This suggests a model closer to the interoperability of the fediverse or other decentralised systems than to the traditional closed platform. In an architecture of this kind, identity and social relationships can in theory outlive any single provider.
For Europe, this is a direction consistent with the desire to reduce big platform lock-in. If users can switch applications without completely losing their network and content, the power of individual intermediaries decreases.
Privacy must be a feature, not a banner
One of the problems with today's web is that many privacy decisions are offloaded onto the user via consent screens. The European pilot attempts to overturn this paradigm: data minimisation and control should be built into the architecture, not options buried in settings.
For young people, this is particularly relevant, because the ability to understand the implications of profiling and data persistence changes with age. A product designed specifically for them can use more conservative defaults and limit certain forms of collection without constantly requiring choices.
The economic challenge remains enormous
The hardest part is not building an application, but making it sustainable. Dominant social networks fund infrastructure, moderation, and development through advertising, commerce, and premium services. An alternative that drastically curtails profiling must find other revenue streams.
Public funding can support the experimental phase, not a global ecosystem indefinitely. The success of the project will therefore also depend on the ability to devise economic models compatible with privacy principles.
Moderation does not disappear with good design
A safer platform can reduce certain harmful incentives, but it will still need to moderate harassment, illegal content, grooming, disinformation, and abuse. Open protocols can even make some forms of enforcement more complex because they distribute responsibility across different operators.
This is why the pilot is valuable precisely as an experiment: it can show which problems are genuinely solved by design and which still require governance, personnel, and appeals procedures.
A small project can have a major regulatory impact
Even if the service resulting from the call remains a niche product, it could still influence standards and regulation. Prototypes make it possible to turn abstract concepts into concrete features: controllable feeds, interoperability, privacy-preserving identity, well-being tools, transparent moderation.
The Commission will be able to use what works as a benchmark in discussions with existing platforms. In this sense, the value of the project is not measured solely by the users it manages to attract.
Europe tries to move from “do not” to “build like this”
European digital policy is often accused of being strong on prohibiting and weak on creating. This call does not change the picture on its own, but it represents an interesting attempt to shift the conversation: not just which practices to restrict, but what type of product to fund.
If the experiment succeeds, it could become a model for other public interventions in open digital infrastructures. If it fails, it will still provide a concrete answer to a question that too often remains theoretical: can a social network truly be engaging without building its success on maximizing attention and data collection?
