Greece moves toward an under-15 social media ban as Europe’s child-safety push hardens

Greece is trying to move one of Europe’s most contested digital-policy arguments out of the realm of warnings and into law. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said this week that Athens will seek to bar children under 15 from major social media platforms from 1 January 2027, presenting the move as a response to anxiety, sleep disruption and what he described as the addictive design of some apps. The proposal immediately places Greece alongside a growing group of governments that no longer believe parental guidance and voluntary platform safeguards are enough to manage youth exposure online.

The core of the Greek plan is relatively straightforward in political language and more complicated in practice. Under the framework outlined publicly on Tuesday and Wednesday, children under 15 would lose access to large social platforms, while the government would require age checks and enforcement tools robust enough to make the restriction more than a symbolic statement. Reporting from the BBC, Guardian, CNA and Politico converges on the same central facts: the measure is expected to move through parliament this summer, the government wants it operational at the start of 2027, and Mitsotakis is coupling the domestic bill with a demand for EU-level support so platforms cannot simply route around national rules.

That last point matters because the Greek government is not presenting this as a narrow culture-war gesture or a one-country morality campaign. Mitsotakis has framed the proposal as a public-health and child-protection measure, but also as part of a broader European regulatory gap. In his public remarks, he argued that many young users feel exhausted by the pressure of being constantly online and by the comparison loops embedded in social platforms. In his letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, he went further, calling for a common EU framework to reinforce national initiatives, a European digital age threshold at 15, and repeat age verification so restrictions cannot be bypassed with a one-time sign-up trick.

The immediate political logic is easy to understand. Governments across Europe have spent the last few years hearing the same complaints from parents, teachers and clinicians: children stay awake too late, arrive at school sleep-deprived, face harassment or humiliation online, and absorb a constant stream of algorithmic comparison that many adults barely manage themselves. Greece has already banned mobile phones in schools and promoted parental-control tools, but the Mitsotakis government is now signaling that softer interventions did not fully answer the problem. For a center-right government, the measure also offers a politically legible way to show intervention on family and youth concerns without waiting for Brussels to act first.Greece to Ban Social Media for Under 15ssj.com·Unverified

Still, the case for a ban does not rest only on political positioning. The supportive argument, as set out by Greek officials and echoed in wider European debate, is that social platforms are not neutral utilities for children in the same way textbooks, phone calls or ordinary websites are. They are designed around retention, alerts, infinite feeds and social validation loops, and those mechanics may bear most heavily on younger users who have less capacity to regulate attention or withstand online pressure. When Mitsotakis says the issue is not technology in general but the addictive design and the business model behind certain applications, he is drawing a line many regulators increasingly want to test in law: that the design of the product, not just the content inside it, can become a child-safety problem.

But critics and skeptics are not short of arguments either, and their concerns deserve more than a passing mention. Social media companies have said blanket bans can be ineffective, difficult to enforce and potentially isolating for vulnerable teenagers who use digital communities for support, information or identity formation. Rights-based critics across Europe make a related point from a different direction: a hard age barrier can push children toward less visible corners of the internet, create pressure for intrusive identity checks, and hand governments and platforms new levers over speech and access that may not stay narrowly targeted.Greece to ban social media for under-15s from 2027france24.com·SecondaryTo display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Greece will ban access to social media for children under the age of 15 from January ​1, 2027, Prime ‌Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Wednesday, citing rising anxiety, sleep problems and the addictive ⁠design of online platforms. Even some voters who support restrictions remain doubtful they will work as advertised, a tension that shows up in public-opinion data cited in the wider debate.Greece to Ban Social Media for Under 15ssj.com·Unverified

That enforcement problem is the part of the Greek plan most likely to decide whether this becomes a serious precedent or another headline measure that fades at implementation. Reuters and other follow-up reporting outside the cluster suggest Athens wants the burden placed on platforms, not on children alone, but the public source set already makes clear that age verification is central to the proposal. That sounds simple until the practical questions begin: What counts as verification without turning the internet into a quasi-ID checkpoint? Who stores the data? How often must ages be rechecked? Which services are covered, and what happens when new apps mimic the same engagement model under a different label? Those are not technical footnotes. They are the policy.

The definition of covered services is also politically revealing. Greek officials, according to CNA, are focusing on platforms associated with endless scrolling and social feedback loops, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, while leaving messaging and some video platforms outside the initial scope. That distinction shows the government is trying to regulate a category of behavior rather than ban youth access to the internet in general. Yet it also exposes the fragility of such line-drawing. Teenagers do not experience the digital world as neat regulatory buckets, and platforms frequently hybridize messaging, video, community and short-form feeds. If a rule targets one product architecture today, product design can move tomorrow.Greece proposes law to keep kids off social mediapolitico.eu·SecondaryATHENS — The Greek government is set to ban children under the age of 15 from using social media platforms. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced the draft law by addressing young people directly in a TikTok video, where he accused “the addictive design of some apps" and their "profit model that’s based on your attention" of taking away "some of your innocence and freedom." "I am certain that many of you ... will be angry with me,” he added.

Europe is the real arena behind the Greek announcement. Athens is plainly trying to become an early mover in a continental argument already visible in France, Spain, Denmark, Austria, the UK and Ireland, while Australia’s under-16 law continues to serve as the most prominent international reference point. That wider context cuts both ways. On one hand, it gives Greece political cover: Athens can say it is acting within an emerging democratic consensus rather than improvising on its own. On the other hand, it means the Greek law will be judged not only on national outcomes but on whether it contributes to a workable European model that can survive legal challenge, technical evasion and civil-liberties scrutiny.

There is also a broader ideological fight underneath the headline. For years, much of the default assumption in Western digital policy was that more connectivity was inherently liberating and that harms could be managed at the margins with moderation policies, education campaigns and optional controls. The Greek move reflects a more skeptical phase now taking hold across parts of Europe: the idea that some platform structures are not merely imperfect but developmentally misaligned for children, and that states may have to intervene upstream rather than cleaning up consequences later. Supporters will see that as overdue realism. Opponents will see it as an open door to paternal overreach and weakly evidenced bans. Both readings are politically live.

For now, the most sober conclusion is that Greece has opened a consequential front in the European struggle over how far democracies should go in limiting children’s access to algorithmic social platforms. The proposal is not law yet, and its hardest questions lie in implementation, privacy, definitional scope and cross-border enforceability. But the direction is unmistakable: Athens is betting that public tolerance for youth-focused digital restriction is rising faster than tolerance for the status quo. If parliament backs the measure and the EU seriously engages with the Greek proposal, the debate will shift from whether such bans are politically imaginable to how they are built, tested and contested in practice.