Q&A with Kaila Jarvis on the EU KIDS Act and the growing complexity of Trust & Safety in 2026
The EU KIDS act aims to impose significant restrictions across media platforms with the aim of protecting minors, with knock on effects for games. These kind of laws lift the bar of responsibility for games companies, and are likely to be replicated elsewhere in the world.
September saw the European Commission publish a draft of its “KIDS” Act. Standing for “Keeping Internet Digital Spaces Accountable and Trustworthy”, it aims to introduce significant restrictions across digital platforms to better protect minors. These restrictions would affect online games, AI companions, chatbots, app stores and operating systems.
And the EU wasn't the only one making significant moves in the Trust & Safety space that month. Discord also rolled out a revised approach to age verification following backlash over privacy concerns.
It's fair to say that navigating Trust & Safety for players is becoming an increasingly complex challenge for games businesses and external partners like Keywords Studios. So we sat down with Keywords Studios' Global Trust & Safety Advisor, Kaila Jarvis, to discuss how developments like these could impact the games and entertainment industry, and what businesses can do to ensure high-quality content moderation and safer community spaces.
To kick things off, what is your reaction to these proposed changes from the EU? Has this been a longtime coming, or has it taken the industry by surprise?
I do feel it’s been coming. There are laws like COPPA in the US and GDPR-K across Europe, and this is an extension of those efforts to keep people and specifically minors safe online. On the company side, however, I think it will be interesting to see how these new laws might impact how they approach child safety online. In my experience, there’s a spectrum of how companies manage Trust and Safety. When early regulations came out, some companies did the minimum just to tick the box, and in part that’s why we see so many strict regulations coming out to combat approaches like this.
How important are government backed steps like this in ensuring a safe environment for all players?
It’s absolutely important, and it comes back to that spectrum. Pre Covid, online safety was considered “nice to have”, but rarely a priority. But during Covid, the massive amounts of people online meant the need for rigorous Trust and Safety parameters skyrocketed and companies naturally were forced to address it. However since then things have returned to a degree to how they were before, with it being up to individual companies how much they prioritise Trust and Safety. So having government backed regulations like what the EU is doing helps level the playing field.
Obviously, the proposed laws are EU only. But Discord’s age verification changes were done to “get ahead of laws that might ask us to implement something less privacy-focused”. Do you think we’ll see similar legislation appear in other parts of the world?
Yeah, absolutely. I’d liken it to when GDPR came into force in the EU. There are varying privacy regulations across the globe, but GDPR set the standard, and companies tend to adhere to the strictest regional standard, so that they’re covered globally. So, with issues like age verification, getting ahead of it like Discord is doing allows them to protect their brand image as a safe space for young people to hang out, while keeping abreast of the present and future child safety legislation that is likely to appear.
One thing that the EU’s proposed legislation shows is that Trust & Safety is not just about preventing harassment & abuse. Preventing AI companions for minors, and restricting loot boxes even more, are just some examples. Do you think Trust & Safety is becoming more complex, or has it been as complex as this for a while now?
When I started in Trust and Safety, the perception was that the “bad F word” was filter. And so Trust and Safety started with largely just bad word blocking. But content moderation technology has come on leaps and bounds since then, meaning we’re able to monitor things like context, nuance, and player behaviours. Is somebody a serial reporter? Are they weaponizing reporting content? So, it’s moved from just text filtering to understanding the entire player journey.
And it’s continuing to change. In the last year and a half, with the advancement of AI, companies are understanding how much Trust and Safety efforts can be automated. But while technology changes, the need for humans does not. We need humans to make decisions on what the tech focuses on, to look at the nuanced “grey areas”, and to provide that authentic human element to helping increase engagement and build trust in game communities in a safe way.
A lot of talk has been around gaming’s link to social media, with the EU Kids Act enforcing strictest limits for apps like Facebook and Instagram, and the ability to access gaming communities and post gaming content in these. How important is it to recognise the link between games and social media and the potential safety issues that arise for minors here?
Increasingly, very important. Some gaming companies have user bases in the billions. A lot of these companies also used to have community spaces that weren’t officially sanctioned by them, such as fan made servers on Discord. And while companies initially ignored these, over time they realised that they have a degree of responsibility here, both to protect their brand image, and to protect the players of their games. The smart ones recognised the growing link between their games and social media spaces, and realised that official Discord servers helped limit PR nightmares that could come from unregulated spaces associated with their games.
Where do you think this kind of legislation will have the biggest impact on, in terms of games, communities etc?
I think initially it’s going to have the biggest impact on those that already have existing communities and player bases. So if we look at Discord as an example, they’re going through this change right now. For those that have already had Discord IDs, they have to go through a reverification process, and companies that have an existing player base are going to have to go through this verification process also.
Whereas for new games coming out, they’ll build that verification process into the signing-on process from the beginning. So I think to change something that already exists has a bigger impact than if you do it right from the get-go.
Some companies, like Roblox and Epic, have large player bases under 18 and rely heavily on UGC, which will no doubt be impacted by this legislation. How can companies like these protect their successful business models whilst keeping Trust & Safety at the forefront?
The challenge for businesses like Roblox, who do a lot of work to protect their players despite what the media suggests, is that as the tools to protect online advance, so do the tools to cause harm advance. Sometimes it can feel a bit like whack-a-mole. Fundamentally, it comes back to that safety by design approach, focusing on integrating Trust and Safety from the ground up and at every step through iteration and testing.
This kind of legislation from the EU is not likely to be the last of its kind coming from world governing bodies. What are the ways in which third-party providers like Keywords Studios can help companies navigate these new laws?
It’s quite multifaceted. If I’m talking to an organisation making its first game, I’ll ask about social features; have they thought about how people are going to interact online in spaces for their games? What are you doing for age verification? And then I’ll provide advice based on their answers. There are some businesses that rely solely on humans for Trust and Safety support, but they are few and far between. Ultimately Keywords offers that “human in the loop” that is so necessary.
We ensure that companies stay up to date with the latest in Trust and Safety tech by partnering with leading industry companies rather than owning our own moderation tech. And Trust and Safety isn’t something you can just plug it in and then leave it to run. You need to constantly be fine-tuning and calibrating the technology as your community evolves, as nefarious behavior evolves, and using a dedicated service like us enables that.
And when it comes to the most important issues - real life threats that are detected in games communities, we have dedicated threat analysts that can investigate these and take appropriate action.
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