Federal Council moves to hold large online platforms to account
Following the consultation on the Communications Platforms Act, protection for minors is to be expanded significantly. But no new law has been adopted yet.
Children and young people spend part of their everyday lives on platforms that do more than display content: they steer attention, through recommendations, search results, messaging functions and personalised advertising. The Federal Council wants to regulate these services more closely in future. On 14 October 2026 it took note of the results of the consultation on the Federal Act on Communications Platforms and Search Engines (KomPG) and decided on the next step.
The timing matters: this is not a social media law that is already in force. The Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications is to prepare a dispatch by the end of June 2027. Only after that will Parliament debate the proposal and, depending on how that goes, further political steps follow. For families, schools and platform providers, the announcement therefore creates no immediate new obligations or rights.
Who would be affected
The preliminary draft produced so far targets very large communications platforms and search engines; according to the federal government, AI search engines are also to be covered. Smaller services are not to be included in the scope. The proposal thus does not start with every forum, every class chat group or every Swiss website, but with services that shape public communication and the search for information to a particularly strong degree.
At its core, the federal government wants to strengthen users' rights and oblige providers to be more transparent. The reporting procedure is no longer to cover only certain cases listed in the original draft. Users are to be able to report presumably unlawful content without complications. This is a procedural obligation: it does not mean that a platform itself decides with binding effect on guilt or criminal liability. But it must provide an accessible system and be able to respond to reports.
What is being added on youth protection
The Federal Council is sticking to the basic direction of the consultation draft but explicitly wants to expand online protection for minors. Very large platforms and search engines are in future to examine whether their services create or amplify risks for minors. They are then to take measures to reduce those risks.
The announcement does not conclusively define what such risks may look like in practice. So it is not only about individual, obviously illegal posts but about how a service is designed and used. The approach is preventive: first analyse risks, then limit them in a traceable way. This is intended to enable minors to take part more safely in public digital discourse.
The Federal Council also names a clearly defined advertising ban: providers are not to serve advertising to minors that is based on profiling. This means advertising derived from the analysis of online behaviour and personal characteristics. That would be an important difference from general advertising. Whether and how platforms must reliably distinguish age and profiling from one another is to be clarified in the final text.
Broad support, but no finished compromise
According to the federal government, the proposal received broad support in the consultation: a majority of the parties represented in the Federal Assembly, of the cantons and of nationwide umbrella organisations and associations responded positively. Support for the general thrust does not mean, however, that all detailed questions have been resolved. With online rules in particular, the practical design determines whether protection is effective without unnecessarily curtailing rights to freedom of expression, privacy and access to information.
The Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications is to involve the Federal Department of Home Affairs and the Federal Social Insurance Office in the youth protection provisions. In addition, the Federal Council wants to decide on the basis of two parliamentary postulates whether further measures should be included in the legal bases.
No final legal text with all obligations has been published so far. It therefore remains open which risk categories become binding, how a platform must demonstrate the risks and which authority monitors compliance. The announcement likewise leaves open whether and how age verification is to be provided for. A ban on profiling-based advertising for minors does not automatically resolve this question.
The consequences of infringements, complaint channels and entry into force are also still undecided. Anyone claiming now that Switzerland has banned social media for under-16s or adopted a concrete obligation to check ID goes too far. What is correct is this: the Federal Council has set a direction and issued a mandate to draft the dispatch.
For parents and young people, the immediate reality therefore stays the same for now: the platform rules, reporting channels and privacy settings of the respective providers continue to apply. The political debate now centres on which additional protection requirements the Federal Council actually puts before Parliament in summer 2027.
