Greece's parliament has approved legislation that will bar children under 15 from using social media platforms, placing the country at the front of a growing European push to curb young people's exposure to algorithm-driven feeds. The law, which takes effect in January 2027, shifts the burden of proof away from families and onto the companies that run the platforms.
Under the new rules, self-declared age - the system most platforms currently rely on, where a user simply types in a birth date - will no longer satisfy legal requirements. Instead, platform operators must deploy verification methods capable of reliably confirming a user's age before granting access.
Shifting the burden onto platforms
Greece's digital ministry has framed the law as an assertion of "substantial corporate responsibility," arguing that companies which build and profit from recommendation algorithms are best placed to police who uses them. Akis Skertsos, the country's minister of state, said relying solely on parents to supervise children's online activity produces uneven protection, since not every family has the same time, technical knowledge or capacity to monitor a child's digital life. A statutory minimum age, he argued, guarantees a common baseline regardless of a household's circumstances.
The approach echoes a wider shift in how regulators think about platform accountability. Rather than treating child safety as a matter of parental control settings, governments increasingly expect companies to build safeguards into the design of their products - an obligation that sits squarely within the European Union's Digital Services Act, which already requires large platforms to assess and mitigate risks to minors.
Part of a coordinated European effort
Greece is not acting alone. It is one of seven countries - alongside Ireland, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Italy and Spain - working with the European Commission on a shared age-verification system designed to confirm whether a user meets a minimum age threshold without transferring unnecessary personal data to platforms. That privacy-conscious design matters: age checks that require uploading identity documents or biometric scans directly to social networks would create new data-protection risks even as they solve an existing one.
The timing also aligns with Brussels' own ambitions. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her September State of the Union address to announce the proposed EU Kids Act, which would set an EU-wide minimum age of 13 for social media use and create consistent rules across member states, rather than the current patchwork of national approaches.
A fragmented but accelerating trend
Greece will become the first EU country to put a children's social media ban into force, but it is unlikely to be the last. Ireland, Spain and Germany are each considering similar restrictions, following Australia's move last year to become the first country globally to bar minors from major platforms. The United Kingdom announced in June that it would block under-16s from large user-to-user platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.
Not every attempt has succeeded. France's top constitutional court blocked a comparable proposal in August, citing concerns over freedom of expression - a reminder that age-based restrictions sit in tension with established rights and will likely face continued legal challenges as more countries attempt them. Greece's law, built around verifiable age checks rather than blanket content bans, may prove more durable precisely because it targets platform access rather than speech itself.