Greece's Under-15 Social Media Ban Tests Age Checks

Greece's parliament has approved a social-media restriction for children under 15, due to take effect on January 1, 2027. Platforms including TikTok, Instagram and Facebook will have to check users' ages, putting an unusually consequential decision between a child and an account: who verifies the age, and what does that verifier learn?

The restriction passed after a lengthy parliamentary debate. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis's governing New Democracy party supported it; PASOK abstained and several other opposition parties voted against it. The government says children cannot wait for a Europe-wide answer. Its opponents have questioned whether a broad restriction can work and how far it should reach. The vote settled the political question in Greece for now. It left platforms with the work of deciding, account by account, who can get in.

On the reported design, parental permission will not override the under-15 limit, and children who already have accounts will not be exempt. That makes this more than a rule for new sign-ups. Platforms must revisit existing users too. Greek authorities have said the January start should not be read as a promise that every affected account will close automatically that day. The date begins an obligation whose practical effect will depend on how platforms identify users and apply the restriction.

One Age Limit, Several Possible Checks

The government has promoted Kids Wallet and Gov.gr Wallet as ways to confirm age while disclosing little to platforms. Digital Governance Minister Dimitris Papastergiou has described using an age token rather than sending a child's identifying details to a service. For the Kids Wallet route, the reported result sent to a platform is intended to establish whether someone meets the age threshold without supplying a name or date of birth.

That is a coherent privacy aim. A platform deciding whether to admit a user has a reason to know whether the user meets the threshold. It has no apparent need for the child's birthday simply to make that decision. Limiting the answer could reduce the personal information exposed to companies whose ordinary business involves holding extensive account records.

The limit on what a platform receives answers only one part of the privacy question. A verifier must produce the age result somehow. The consequential details are what information that process uses, who handles it, whether anyone can link a check to a service or account, and how long any records last. An over-or-under-15 response does not, by itself, settle those questions. Nor does asking them establish that a wallet stores children's browsing histories or sends identity records to platforms.

There is also more than one possible route. Kids Wallet and Gov.gr Wallet are described as options, with other qualifying verification methods permitted. Accounts of whether families must use a state-backed app differ; the rule should not be treated as a universal wallet mandate. The enacted text and detailed technical rules will be decisive for the exact obligations and data safeguards. For readers, the immediate practical question is which check a platform offers them, rather than whether the government's preferred wallet exists.

Multiple routes could spare families from having to use one app. They could also produce different experiences: one platform might accept an age token while another asks for a different form of proof. Whether those routes protect privacy to the same standard, and whether users can challenge a mistaken age decision, will shape how burdensome the restriction feels to people old enough to use a service. Those are implementation questions, not claims that any platform has already adopted a particular method.

The incentive structure is clear even while those details develop. Platforms carry the age-check duty; the measure does not create new fines for children or parents, and oversight is expected to involve Greek authorities and, for the largest services, the European Commission under the Digital Services Act. Parents may help a child use a wallet or parental controls. They cannot, under the reported restriction, authorize an otherwise barred social-media account. A family preference and a platform compliance decision now occupy different places in the system.

Why Greece is Moving Before Brussels

Greece had already barred mobile phones in schools in 2024, a narrower intervention aimed at a different setting. The new measure reaches accounts used outside school and puts responsibility on online services rather than teachers. Mitsotakis has also said he wants the European Union to move in this direction. Greece's law arrives while member states are still considering what a shared rule should look like.

The European Commission's proposed EU KIDS Act takes a different approach. As described in the proposal, children under 13 would be excluded from social media, while 13- and 14-year-olds could have restricted, parent-managed accounts. Greece's reported under-15 rule does not offer that parental exception. The EU proposal still requires agreement by the European Parliament and member states before it becomes law. For a 14-year-old, the distinction is concrete: supervised access under the proposed EU model, exclusion under Greece's reported rule. The competing designs also show why the age number alone does not describe a policy.

France offers a sharper warning about legal design. On August 14, 2026, its Constitutional Council struck down an under-15 social-media prohibition. In an analysis of the decision, privacy-law practitioners explain that the council accepted protecting children as a legitimate aim but found the restriction disproportionate. Its reach could catch collaborative and educational services without distinguishing their risks; parents had no route to authorize access for an individual child. The council also found inadequate legislative safeguards for the age checks that all users, including adults, would have to undergo.

France's constitutional ruling does not decide the fate of a Greek law operating in a different legal setting. It identifies three questions Greece's implementation cannot answer with a threshold token alone: which services fall inside the boundary, whether the rule accommodates different circumstances, and what safeguards govern proof of age. A narrow answer sent to a platform may help on disclosure while leaving the breadth of the prohibition untouched.

Australia supplies a test of operation rather than constitutionality. Its under-16 account restriction took effect in December 2025. In an early University of Newcastle study, researchers followed 408 adolescents aged 12 to 17 before and three months after implementation. Around 86% of under-16 participants reported using at least one restricted platform in the previous week at follow-up, and roughly two-thirds of adolescents reported encountering an age check. Those self-reported results capture an early period, not a long-term compliance rate for every Australian child or a forecast for Greece.

Australia's rule asks identified platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s holding accounts; Greece's age limit and proposed checking routes differ. Still, the Australian findings expose the gap between an enacted restriction and a consistently experienced check. Some young people reported using their own accounts, while others described fake or shared ones. Making checks stricter may close some routes around the rule, but each added demand for proof raises the stakes for privacy and for users incorrectly classified as children.

Greece has chosen a date and an age. Platforms must now turn both into decisions about real accounts, using methods that can keep children out while letting older users through. The test for January is not simply whether a wallet can return a yes-or-no answer. It is whether every permitted route makes an accurate decision with safeguards that cover the process producing it.