Greece has become the first European Union member state to pass legislation barring children under 15 from using social media, placing legal responsibility for age verification squarely on platform operators rather than parents. The law, approved by parliament and set to take effect in January 2027, marks a decisive shift in how governments are choosing to confront the documented harms of unrestricted youth access to online platforms.
Shifting the Burden onto Platforms
What distinguishes the Greek approach from earlier, largely symbolic age limits is its insistence that self-declared age is not an acceptable safeguard. Under the new framework, platform owners must deploy reliable verification mechanisms, and companies that understand the algorithms driving engagement on their services are expected to build in protective measures accordingly. Greece's digital ministry has described this as an acknowledgment of "substantial corporate responsibility" - a phrase that signals a broader regulatory mood across Europe, one less willing to treat platforms as neutral conduits and more inclined to treat them as designers of environments that can be made safer or more exploitative by choice.
Greek minister of state Akis Skertsos framed the law as a matter of equity as much as safety, arguing that relying solely on parental oversight leaves children unequally protected depending on their household's time, knowledge, and resources. That argument reframes online child safety not as a private family concern but as a baseline public protection, comparable to other universal child welfare standards.
A Piece of a Larger European Framework
The Greek law does not stand alone. It aligns with the EU's Digital Services Act, which already imposes transparency and safety obligations on large platforms operating in the bloc. Greece is also among seven member states - alongside Ireland, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Italy, and Spain - working with the European Commission on a shared age verification system designed to minimise data exposure, confirming only whether a user meets an age threshold rather than transmitting identifying details.
This matters technically as much as politically. Age verification systems have historically raised their own privacy concerns, since proving one's age often means handing over documents or biometric data to third parties. A minimal-disclosure model, if implemented well, would let platforms confirm eligibility without building new repositories of sensitive personal data - addressing one of the more legitimate criticisms levelled against blunt verification mandates.
Commission president Ursula von der Leyen's proposed EU Kids Act, announced in September, would push further still, seeking to ban social media access for children under 13 across all member states and standardising rules that currently vary by country. Greece's law, by setting the bar at 15, is stricter than that proposal, and its implementation will likely serve as an early test case for how enforceable such thresholds actually are in practice.
Diverging Paths Across Borders
Not every attempt at restriction has succeeded. France's top court blocked a similar under-15 ban in August, citing concerns over freedom of expression - a reminder that child protection measures can collide with other legal rights and that courts, not just legislatures, will shape how far these policies can go. Ireland, Spain, and Germany are each weighing their own restrictions, while the UK has moved to bar under-16s from major platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and X. Australia set the precedent globally last year as the first country to enact a blanket ban on minors' access to major platforms.
Taken together, these measures suggest a turning point: the era of treating platform access for children as a matter of individual parental choice is giving way to a model of enforceable, state-backed minimum standards. Whether verification technology can keep pace with that ambition - without compromising privacy in the process - will determine whether these laws deliver real protection or simply shift the problem elsewhere.