Countries Across Europe Take Action to Ban Social Media for Minors

Under-16 social media bans are picking up steam across Europe.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis was the latest leader to praise a ban, saying that the experts he’s spoken to have said that social media is “terribly harmful to children.”

The Czech government is seriously considering a ban this year, according to Deputy Prime Minister Karel Havlicek, who gave remarks on CNN Prima News, a Czech TV news channel.

Earlier this week, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the country’s plans to ban under-16 users from social media, calling it a measure to protect kids “from the digital wild west,” at a speech in Dubai. In his speech, Sánchez also said that Spain had joined a new alliance with five other European countries that he called the “coalition of the digitally willing.” Although the identity of those five other countries is uncertain, there are certainly more than five countries in Europe that have signaled willingness to limit the social media use of kids and teens.

Also this week, both Greece and Turkey announced that they were edging closer to a ban.

Last week, the lower chamber of the French parliament voted in favor of a ban targeting under-15s and the bill now makes its way to the French Senate.

German digital minister Karsten Wildberger has said that he sees “a lot of merit” in a social media ban and considers age restriction “more than justified.” Austrian government officials said that they are considering a ban for under-14s that could come into effect before the beginning of the next school year, while the Irish minister for media said that he plans to introduce online child safety measures like a ban for under-16s “incrementally.”

Poland is allegedly drafting a law to ban under-15s from social media, Portugal is debating a proposed ban that would include access with parental consent, the United Kingdom’s House of Lords backed a social media ban for under-16s in a vote last month, Norway is working on a similar hard limit and Denmark announced plans for a ban as early as November.

The European Union is also weighing a ban that would impact all 27 European countries that are a part of the bloc. The Dutch government reportedly has shown support.

What sparked this now global regulatory wave was a historic social media ban in Australia targeting under-16s. Starting mid-December, scores of Australian children and teens were banned from social media platforms TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Kick and Twitch.

A jumping-off point for the Australian ban was American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation,” which argues that the overwhelming presence of social media in the critical developmental stages of puberty has fundamentally rewired the brains of those born after 1995.

Social media addiction among children and teens has been linked to higher feelings of loneliness, depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorders, body image issues and poor sleep quality. Many regulators are also increasingly worried about unchecked cyberbullying.

The American Academy of Pediatrics released a report last month linking prolonged digital media use with language delays, anger issues, weaker cognition and even increased risk of type 2 diabetes, and asked tech companies and the government to put strict guardrails in place that prohibit harmful social media design features like user profiling, autoplay and algorithmic recommender systems.

American big tech companies, which have an outsized influence on the digital world as the owners of some of the top social media platforms that are facing the fallouts of these bans, are not happy with this trend. Meta, which operates the teen-favorite social media platform Instagram, has repeatedly asked Australian regulators to rethink the ban. (On a related note, Meta recently shared plans to make its social media feeds even more addictive with LLM-enhanced recommendation systems. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “soon” there will be “an AI that understands you” and tailors your feed accordingly.)

Following Sánchez’s speech, in which he also shared intentions to hold tech companies legally responsible for hateful and illegal content on their platforms and for algorithm manipulation, Elon Musk took to X to call the Spanish prime minister a “true fascist totalitarian,” and “a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain.”

As countries around the world start introducing bans that hurt American tech companies, it will be interesting to see how the Trump administration reacts. Trump has repeatedly made American big tech interests central to his foreign trade policy, especially regarding Europe. Trump considers European regulation of digital platforms and tech companies “overseas extortion” against the United States, and while some of his trade decisions may have led to looser regulation in some instances, it has also pushed certain European governments further away from American tech.