Europe Wants to Keep Children Off Social Media: What’s It Really About?

 Greece has become the latest European country to propose a legal minimum age for social media, with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis saying children under 15 should be barred from accessing the platforms from January 1, 2027. Austria has announced plans for a ban on under-14s, while France has already tried to impose a “digital majority” for under-15s. Australia has gone furthest in practice, presenting itself as the international model after platforms restricted access to 4.7 million underage accounts.

The policy language across these countries is remarkably similar. Governments say they are protecting children from addictive products, sleep disruption and psychological harm. The operational reality is more complicated. Australia’s experience suggests that these measures do not produce a clean ban so much as a large-scale age-verification and enforcement system, one that still leaves obvious routes around the rules while expanding the amount of monitoring and identity checking built into ordinary online life....<<<Read More>>>...