Greece has become the latest European country to propose a legal minimum age for social media, with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis saying children under 15 should be barred from accessing the platforms from January 1, 2027. Austria has announced plans for a ban on under-14s, while France has already tried to impose a “digital majority” for under-15s. Australia has gone furthest in practice, presenting itself as the international model after platforms restricted access to 4.7 million underage accounts.
The policy language across these countries is remarkably similar. Governments say they are protecting children from addictive products, sleep disruption and psychological harm. The operational reality is more complicated. Australia’s experience suggests that these measures do not produce a clean ban so much as a large-scale age-verification and enforcement system, one that still leaves obvious routes around the rules while expanding the amount of monitoring and identity checking built into ordinary online life.
Greece says it will ban social media for under-15s from the start of 2027 and will push the European Union to adopt a common digital age of majority at 15, supported by mandatory age verification and a unified enforcement framework.
Reuters reported that the Greek government has linked the proposal to rising concern about addiction, anxiety and sleep problems among children, and cited polling showing that public support for the plan is strong. In political terms, the appeal is obvious. Social media is widely distrusted, children are a sympathetic constituency, and governments can present themselves as intervening against powerful and unpopular technology companies.
The difficulty lies in turning the headlines into reality.
A ban of this kind can only function if platforms are required to distinguish reliably between those who are old enough and those who are not. Once that becomes the practical focus, the issue is not just whether children should be on Instagram or TikTok, but also becomes a question of who is verifying age, what evidence is being collected, how long that information is retained, and how much new infrastructure is being built to control access to digital spaces.
Greece may be selling the policy as child protection, but the route to implementation runs directly through verification systems that are likely to extend far beyond one narrow class of users.
Austria is following a similar path. Al Jazeera reported that the Austrian government plans to ban children under 14 from using social media, with junior minister Alexander Proll arguing that the platforms are addictive and harmful to young people. The justification is familiar and, at a broad level, difficult to dispute. These platforms are designed to hold attention, reward compulsion and keep users returning. The weaker point is the assumption that a legal age threshold can be translated smoothly into a workable, proportionate system of enforcement.
As in Greece, the real challenge is not announcing the rule but administering it. If the state intends to stop under-14s from opening accounts, then platforms need stronger forms of age assurance. Stronger age assurance usually means more data collection, more intrusive account checks, greater reliance on third-party verification providers, or the deployment of biometric or behavioural systems to estimate age.
Those mechanisms may be politically easier to introduce when framed around child protection, but they still represent an expansion of digital oversight. Austria’s proposal therefore deserves to be read not only as a social policy but also as part of a broader shift toward a more tightly gated and more heavily verified internet.
Countries including Britain, Spain, Slovenia, Denmark, Malaysia, Canada and parts of the United States are also considering or debating restrictions of this kind. That reflects a broad and understandable loss of confidence in social media companies, whose products are increasingly regarded as addictive and harmful, especially for children. It also reflects a political environment in which governments are under pressure to be seen responding to a problem that is now widely acknowledged.
Still, the spread of these laws points to a second and less openly discussed development. Every serious effort to keep minors off social media depends on stronger proof-of-age systems. Stronger proof-of-age systems lead almost inevitably to broader identity checks, more platform data collection, and more routine demands that users prove themselves before entering digital spaces. In that sense, the trend is not only about restricting children’s access. It is also about normalising a model of internet governance based on verification and controlled entry. Even when the policy objective is defensible, the infrastructure it requires deserves scrutiny on its own terms.
No comments:
Post a Comment