“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 April 15, 2026, the European Commission announced that its age verification app is technically ready for deployment. The system uses zero-knowledge proofs — a cryptographic method that lets a person prove they are above a certain age (13, 16, or 18) without revealing their actual birthdate or any other personal data.
Seven EU member states — France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Greece, Cyprus, and Ireland — plan to integrate the app into their national digital identity wallets by the end of 2026. The goal is to provide a single, privacy-preserving standard that platforms can rely on, replacing the current patchwork of national rules with something that actually works across borders.