Greece limits kids' social apps
Greece moved to bar children under 15 from creating profiles and interacting on major social platforms, marking a sharper policy stance on youth social‑media exposure. The change signals growing political appetite to treat platforms as youth‑risk environments and is being cited as a directional signal for how regulators may judge platform safety elsewhere. (latimes.com)
Greece says children under 15 will be blocked from social media starting on January 1, 2027, and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced it in a video posted on TikTok, the exact kind of platform the rule would hit. (apnews.com) The Greek government says the target is not the whole internet but social platforms where kids create profiles, post publicly, and interact with strangers or algorithm-driven feeds. Officials tied the move to anxiety, sleep loss, and what Mitsotakis called addictive platform design. (aol.com) The age line is 15 because Greece is moving from lighter guardrails to a hard minimum age, not a parental-permission model. France’s 2023 law took the softer route by requiring parental consent for users under 15 instead of banning them outright. (france24.com) The hard part is enforcement, because a birth date box is as easy to dodge as writing a fake age on a movie ticket. Greece is pushing age checks and wider European Union coordination because one country cannot easily police global apps on its own. (wired.com) (biometricupdate.com) That European backdrop matters because the European Commission published child-safety guidelines under the Digital Services Act on July 14, 2025. Those guidelines tell platforms accessible to minors to reduce risks to children’s privacy, safety, and well-being, and they explicitly discuss age assurance tools. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) Greece is not acting in a vacuum. Australia passed a national ban for under-16s in November 2024, and Reuters reported this month that countries from Spain to Malaysia are studying versions of the same idea. (msn.com 1) (msn.com 2) The policy also shows how governments are changing the way they describe social apps. Instead of treating them like neutral message boards, officials are increasingly treating them like products with built-in risk features for children, especially recommendation systems that keep serving the next video or post. (nytimes.com) (aol.com) What happens next is more practical than philosophical. Greece still has to write the regulation during 2026, decide which services count as social media, and figure out whether the burden falls on app stores, platforms, phone makers, or all three before the January 1, 2027 start date. (bloomberg.com)
