“The question is not whether young people should have access to social media. The question is whether social media should have access to young people.”
That sentence — delivered by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on May 12, 2026, at the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children in Copenhagen — marked the strongest signal yet that Brussels intends to redesign how platforms treat children. The Commission announced that its forthcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA) will directly target “addictive and harmful design practices” — endless scrolling, autoplay, push notifications, and the algorithmic systems that quietly keep minors locked into their phones for hours every day.
Governments worldwide are rewriting the rules for how social media platforms can interact with minors. The pace has accelerated sharply since Australia became the first country to enforce a blanket under-16 ban in December 2025. Several EU member states have followed with under-15 laws, and the EU itself is layering on the Digital Services Act, the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act, and a bloc-wide age verification app.
This page tracks the current state in every country we cover — sortable by status, age limit, or year. It is updated monthly. See our methodology for how status fields are sourced and verified.
In the eighteen months after Australia became the first country to ban social media for under-16s, the policy crossed the Atlantic and the English Channel. By May 2026, five European countries had either passed or actively legislated their own variants. France, Greece, Denmark and Cyprus settled on 15 as the cutoff. Turkey landed on 15 too, but with a markedly different enforcement model that has drawn criticism from civil liberties groups.
On the night of April 22, 2026, Turkey’s parliament passed a bill restricting social media for children under 15. The headline reads like the ones from Athens, Nicosia or Paris earlier in the month — another European country drawing an age line for social platforms. The details read very differently.
Unlike the EU’s zero-knowledge approach, Turkey’s law is tightly coupled to the national ID system, adds a one-hour takedown mandate for large platforms, and arrives on top of a parallel draft that would require every adult user to log in with an e-Devlet (national ID) credential. That is why press-freedom groups, law professors and opposition MPs are calling it something other than a child-protection law.
Cyprus has become the latest European country to ban social media for children. On April 16, 2026, President Nikos Christodoulides announced that children under 15 will no longer be allowed to use social media platforms in Cyprus.
The announcement comes just one day after the European Commission declared its age verification app technically ready for deployment — and just eight days after neighboring Greece announced its own under-15 ban.
What Is Being Banned?
The ban targets social media platforms built around user-generated content and algorithmic feeds:
On October 8, 2025, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen opened parliament with a sentence that set the tone for the rest of the year in Europe: “Mobile phones and social media are stealing our children’s childhood.” One month later her coalition had a deal. Denmark’s social media ban for under-15s — with a parental opt-in from age 13 — is now the template several other EU countries are watching most closely.
While France has passed a ban for under-15s and Greece has announced the same for 2027, Germany is still arguing about the number on the door. On April 13, 2026, two contributions landed on the same day from very different directions: the Cologne-based Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (IW) released its Bildungsmonitor analysis suggesting 13 as a sensible minimum age, and in the taz, Potsdam education researcher Nina Kolleck argued that any age limit — 13, 14, or 16 — is a capitulation to TikTok and Meta if the laws already on the books go unenforced.
TikTok is, for most children, the first social network they want and the last one parents feel confident about. That instinct is not misplaced. In 2026, the answer to “is TikTok safe for my child?” is: it depends on your child’s age, what you are willing to set up, and how much you are prepared to talk to them about what they see.
This guide walks you through what is actually on TikTok, what the platform does and does not do to protect minors, and what combination of tools genuinely keeps younger children off it.
Greece has announced it will ban children under 15 from using social media — and the announcement came in an unusual way. On April 8, 2026, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis posted a video on TikTok to announce a ban on… TikTok (and other platforms) for young users.
“We decided to proceed with something difficult but necessary — banning access to social media for children under 15,” the Prime Minister said in his video message.
Nearly half of all teenagers say they feel addicted to social media. That is not an accident. The platforms they use every day — Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube — were designed to be difficult to put down. In 2026, courts and regulators around the world are beginning to treat this as what it is: a deliberate business strategy built on the attention of children.
Here is what parents need to know about how these platforms work, what the evidence shows, and what is being done about it.