Greece plans teen ban

Greece’s prime minister used TikTok on April 8 to tell children they may soon be too young to use TikTok. Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Greece will bring in a ban on social media for anyone under 15, with the rule taking effect on January 1, 2027. (ekathimerini.com) He said the law will be introduced in the summer of 2026, which gives platforms a few months to work out how to identify Greek users who are 14 or younger before the start date. Bloomberg reported the government framed it as a national rule first and a push for wider European Union action second. (bloomberg.com) Mitsotakis tied the move to three specific complaints he said he keeps hearing from parents: anxiety, poor sleep, and apps built to keep children scrolling. In his video, he said the goal was not to remove children from technology entirely but to stop hours of screen time from becoming the default after school and before bed. (ekathimerini.com) This is a sharper line than Europe used a few years ago. France passed a 2023 law requiring parental consent for social media users under 15, and in January 2026 French lawmakers approved a tougher bill aimed at banning accounts for that age group outright. (france24.com) (pbs.org) Australia went even further in November 2024 by passing a law that requires covered platforms to stop children under 16 from creating accounts. That made Australia the first country to set a national minimum age above 15, and it turned the debate from “what content should children see” into “should they be allowed in at all.” (loc.gov) Europe’s own regulators have been building the plumbing for this shift. In July 2025, the European Commission published child-protection guidelines under the Digital Services Act and released a prototype age-verification app designed to prove someone is old enough without handing every website a full identity document. (ec.europa.eu) That matters because a national ban is easy to announce and hard to enforce. If a 14-year-old in Athens can still sign up with a false birthday, then the real fight moves from parliament to age checks, app stores, device settings, and whether platforms must verify age before an account is opened. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) (wired.com) Greece is also trying to drag that enforcement fight up to the European Union level instead of handling it alone. Reports on April 9 said Greek officials want a bloc-wide “digital age of majority” at 15, which would give platforms one age floor across 27 countries instead of a patchwork of national rules. (biometricupdate.com) (yahoo.com) If more countries copy Greece, the first people forced to recalculate will not be teenagers but platforms, advertisers, and measurement teams. A youth audience that looks large in one market today could become partly illegal to serve in 2027, which means cross-country growth charts will start mixing consumer demand with whatever each government decided children are allowed to access. (nytimes.com)