Greece Announces Social Media Ban for Children Under 15

On April 8, 2026, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced via TikTok — a platform his own government plans to restrict — that children under 15 will be banned from maintaining social media accounts starting January 1, 2027 [1]. The ban applies regardless of parental consent, covering platforms that promote "endless scrolling" including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube [2]. Approximately 80% of Greeks polled in February 2026 supported the measure [3].

"Our aim is not to keep you away from technology but to combat addiction to certain applications that harms your innocence and your freedom," Mitsotakis said [2].

Greece now joins a growing international movement. Australia became the first country to enforce a nationwide ban for under-16s in December 2025 [4]. France passed its own under-15 restriction with full enforcement scheduled for September 2026 [4]. The UK is still consulting on whether to follow suit [4]. In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Mitsotakis called for a "unified European framework" and a continent-wide "Digital Age of Majority" set at 15 [1].

Source: Legislative Records (compiled)

Data as of Apr 8, 2026CSV

What the Law Covers — and What It Doesn't

The legislation targets social media platforms specifically — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat are named [3]. It also extends restrictions on minors' access to online gambling, alcohol and tobacco promotion, and explicit content [2].

Crucially, WhatsApp is not expected to be included in the social media list [3]. This distinction matters: WhatsApp is widely used among Greek families for group communication, and its exclusion suggests the law focuses on algorithmically-driven feed platforms rather than messaging services. But it also creates an obvious gap — children barred from Instagram could still access unmoderated group chats and shared content through messaging apps.

The law also contemplates additional restrictions for the 16-to-18 age group, though details remain unspecified [3].

The Scale of the Problem in Greece

A 2025 nationwide survey by the Greek Safer Internet Centre, involving 2,500 students aged 10 to 18 across Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Heraklion, and Larissa, found that 75% of primary school children (typically under 13) already use social media [5]. Among secondary school students, the figure rises to 92% [5].

Source: EU Safer Internet Centre / Greek National Survey 2025

Data as of Feb 1, 2025CSV

The survey also revealed a key enforcement challenge: 66% of primary school students and 74% of secondary school students admitted to entering false birthdates to register on platforms [5]. Existing age gates, in other words, are already widely circumvented by the population the law aims to protect.

How Greece Plans to Enforce It: The Kids Wallet System

Unlike Australia, where platforms carry the primary responsibility for age verification, Greece is pursuing what officials call a "source-based" approach — enforcement that begins at the device level rather than relying solely on platform-side checks [6].

The core mechanism is the Kids Wallet app, originally developed to prevent minors from purchasing tobacco and alcohol [7]. The app uses a parent or guardian's Greek digital ID, validated through TaxisNet (the national authorization service), to generate a scannable barcode confirming whether a user meets the age threshold [8]. Parents must grant consent for the app to access civil registry data, including the child's date of birth [8].

Platforms would then be required to integrate Kids Wallet verification into their registration processes [6]. Existing underage accounts would face a verification deadline, after which non-verified accounts could be locked [6].

The Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission (EETT) will oversee enforcement [6]. But there are already visible cracks: reports indicate children can circumvent the system by sharing screenshots of parents' barcodes [7]. The app is also not mandatory for all users, and its effectiveness depends on both universal adoption by parents and integration by every platform operating in Greece [7].

Penalties: What Platforms Face

The penalty regime is among the most aggressive proposed in Europe. Non-compliant platforms face fines of up to 6% of global revenue [3] — comparable to the most severe GDPR penalties. For a company like Meta, with 2025 revenues exceeding $160 billion, a maximum fine could theoretically reach nearly $10 billion.

However, key details remain unresolved. The government has not yet finalized whether fines will be levied per underage account discovered, per platform, or per violation event [3]. Officials are also "studying very seriously" whether to add penal code provisions for parental responsibility, modeled on existing laws around minors' access to alcohol or drugs [3].

Greece's track record of collecting fines from major tech companies under existing EU digital law is limited. The EETT has enforcement experience with telecommunications providers, but compelling compliance from Silicon Valley giants operating across jurisdictions is a different challenge entirely.

The Evidence: Does Social Media Harm Children Under 15?

The scientific literature on social media and adolescent mental health has grown enormously — from roughly 3,300 papers in 2011 to over 42,900 in 2025, according to OpenAlex data [9].

Source: OpenAlex

Data as of Jan 1, 2026CSV

The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory flagged that adolescents spending more than three hours daily on social media face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms [10]. A scoping review found 82.6% of included studies positively linked depression with social media use, and 78.3% linked anxiety [10]. Research from the UK identified sensitive developmental periods: for girls, ages 11 to 13 showed the highest correlation between social media use and poor mental health; for boys, it was ages 14 to 15 [10].

These findings offer some support for the age-15 threshold — it roughly captures the end of the most vulnerable period for both sexes. But the evidence also raises an uncomfortable question: if the harm peaks between 11 and 15, why not set the threshold at 13, as the United States does under COPPA, or at 18, as some child welfare advocates propose?

The dose-response relationship further complicates matters. For children aged 10 to 15, limited social media use shows no effect on most emotional and behavioral outcomes and can even benefit social relationships [10]. The harms concentrate among heavy users. A blanket ban treats all usage as equally dangerous, which the research does not support.

The Case Against the Ban

Digital Literacy and Development

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam argue that a blanket ban eliminates beneficial aspects alongside problematic ones [11]. Associate Professor Wouter van den Bos notes that social media "can offer a sense of connection" and opportunities for creative inspiration, particularly for children whose immediate social circles don't provide such connections [11].

Only 42% of parents surveyed in that research favored a total ban — and most parents viewed age 12, not 15, as the appropriate age for smartphone use [11]. The Amsterdam researchers advocate banning specific harmful features (such as infinite scroll and influencer advertising to minors) rather than entire platforms [11].

UNICEF's Warning

UNICEF has been the most prominent institutional voice cautioning against age-based bans. In December 2025, the organization warned that "age restrictions alone won't keep children safe online" and that bans "come with their own risks and may even backfire" [12]. For marginalized or isolated children, social media "is a lifeline providing access to learning, connection, play, and self-expression" [12].

UNICEF's core concern is displacement: children barred from regulated platforms will access social media through workarounds, shared devices, or less regulated platforms, "ultimately making it harder to protect them" [12].

The Rebellion Effect

Brookings Institution research highlights that social media bans can instill "feelings of isolation, fostering rebellion against authority, and contributing to underdeveloped digital literacy skills" [13]. Studies on parental restrictions found that overly rigid controls produced "backlash behavior," with teens making decisions "without considering the risks to themselves and without exercising critical thinking" [14]. Rather than learning to manage digital environments, banned children may simply learn to evade controls.

Australia's Early Lessons

Australia's ban on under-16s, enacted in December 2025, provides the closest real-world test case. By February 2026, Snapchat alone had deactivated over 415,000 accounts [4]. But enforcement gaps emerged quickly.

By late March 2026, Australia's Communications Minister confirmed investigations into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube for allowing underage users who declared themselves under 16 to make repeated age-verification attempts [4]. The E-Safety Commission accused platforms of insufficient measures to prevent account creation for underage users [4]. Children were already circumventing the ban through VPNs, false age declarations, and borrowed identification [4].

Australia's experience suggests that even well-resourced regulators struggle to close the gap between legislative intent and technical reality. Greece, with a smaller regulatory apparatus and a novel device-level enforcement model, faces arguably steeper odds.

Privacy: The Cost of Age Verification at Scale

Building a national age-verification infrastructure requires collecting and processing personal data on a significant scale. The Kids Wallet system stores children's first names, last names, and dates of birth, encrypted in the Android Keystore [7]. Parents must authorize access to civil registry records via their digital IDs [8].

Greece maintains that data collection complies with GDPR principles, including data minimization and limited retention periods [15]. The system is designed so that parents cannot read children's private messages, attempting to balance supervision with privacy [7].

But civil liberties concerns are real. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned that digital identity systems for age verification in Europe risk creating surveillance infrastructure that extends well beyond its original purpose [16]. The IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals) notes that age verification is "far more difficult than it looks" from a data-protection standpoint, because any verification mechanism robust enough to be effective inevitably collects data that can be repurposed [16].

No formal assessment by Greece's Data Protection Authority (Hellenic DPA) of the Kids Wallet system's full-scale deployment has been made publicly available as of this writing. Given that the system would need to verify the ages of millions of Greek minors and link their identities to device-level restrictions, the absence of a published privacy impact assessment is a notable gap.

The Small Platform Problem

The compliance burden falls differently across the market. Meta, TikTok's parent ByteDance, and Alphabet have the engineering resources and legal teams to integrate a Greek age-verification API, even if they resist doing so. Smaller Greek-language platforms and emerging competitors face a structurally different challenge.

Integrating Kids Wallet verification requires technical development, legal compliance work, and ongoing maintenance. For a startup or niche social platform operating in the Greek market, these costs could be prohibitive. The regulation risks inadvertently entrenching the market position of the very companies whose algorithmic design prompted the legislation in the first place — an outcome that would reduce, not increase, competition and user choice.

The EU's Digital Services Act already imposes asymmetric obligations based on platform size, with stricter requirements for "very large online platforms" (those with over 45 million EU users). Greece's legislation, as currently described, does not appear to include similar tiered requirements [3].

What Comes Next

The Greek government says the preparatory work is complete, with remaining tasks including finalizing the legal definition of "digital addiction," setting specific fine amounts, and deciding on parental penal liability [3]. The legislation is expected to be drafted over the summer of 2026 and take effect on January 1, 2027 [1].

Mitsotakis has also pushed the issue to the European level, urging the Commission to establish a unified framework by end of 2026, including biannual age re-verification by platforms [1]. Whether Brussels moves that quickly — or at all — remains uncertain. The EU's track record on digital regulation suggests any continent-wide standard would take years to negotiate, leaving member states to pursue their own approaches in the interim.

Greece's ban will ultimately be judged not by its ambition but by its execution. The 75% of Greek primary schoolers already on social media [5], the two-thirds who have already lied about their age to get there [5], and the history of similar bans struggling against determined workarounds in Australia [4] all suggest that legislation alone — however well-intentioned — does not automatically translate into fewer children on social media. Whether Greece's device-level approach and state-backed verification system can overcome the enforcement failures seen elsewhere is the central question that January 2027 will begin to answer.