Abstract:

As digital platforms increasingly shape adolescents’ everyday experiences, the environments in which young people access information, communicate and construct their identities have become central spaces of both social interaction and regulatory concern. Social media services, messaging applications and other algorithm-driven digital ecosystems significantly influence adolescents’ daily lives while raising new questions regarding safety, shared responsibility and the regulation of digital environments across Europe.

Within this framework, this study analyses the evolution of regulatory approaches to the digital protection of minors in Spain, while considering the broader European context. The main objective is to understand the situation faced by adolescents aged 12–17 in contemporary digital environments by examining emerging regulatory frameworks and how social issues—such as cyberbullying, grooming and exposure to inappropriate content—are reflected in public and media debates.

The research adopts an exploratory design based on a monitoring system assisted by Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), implemented through a Large Language Model, specifically ChatGPT (version 5.2). Two structured prompts were designed to retrieve relevant public sources weekly between 1 August 2025 and 1 March 2026. The first generated a corpus of regulatory and institutional documents related to minors’ digital protection, including legislative initiatives, parliamentary debates and policy reports. The second collected news published in national and European media to analyse how regulatory developments are reflected in public discourse and in the social construction of digital risks associated with adolescence.

In a second analytical stage, the resulting dataset—composed of a regulatory documentary corpus and a complementary media corpus—was organised through thematic classification based on international knowledge organisation systems. Thesauri widely used in public policy and education, such as the UNESCO Thesaurus and EuroVoc, were employed to structure and semantically standardise the analysis. This process enabled identification of recurring categories related to smartphone use in schools, youth engagement with social media, cyberbullying and digital sexual violence, as well as debates surrounding artificial intelligence and child safety.

The analysis shows that many regulatory initiatives take the form of guidance-oriented or soft-law instruments, reflecting a regulatory environment still evolving. Increasing institutional attention is observed regarding age-verification mechanisms, platform accountability and possible restrictions on minors’ access to online services, while media coverage highlights growing societal concern about digital risks affecting adolescents.

These findings suggest that protecting minors in digital environments cannot rely solely on regulation but also requires strengthening students’ critical and media competences. Information literacy therefore emerges as a key element for fostering safe, critical and responsible digital participation in secondary education across Spain and Europe. The study contributes to emerging research on regulatory frameworks governing digital environments and their relationship with information literacy in secondary education by proposing a systematic AI-assisted monitoring approach for analysing the intersection between digital regulation, media discourse and educational challenges.

Keywords:

Secondary education, ICT and Digital Skills, Social Media and Social Networks, Online and digital risks, Generative Artificial Intelligence.