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.