What parliament just decided
Greece’s parliament passed the law on Friday after a heated debate that began on Thursday and stretched into the early hours of the next day. The vote was lopsided in a way that reveals just how politically divisive the idea remains: only Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative New Democracy party — which holds a parliamentary majority — voted in favour. No other party backed the bill.
The main opposition socialist party, PASOK, abstained. It had argued for a softer alternative: an outright ban only for under-13s, with parental controls for 13- and 14-year-olds. Left-wing SYRIZA, the Communist Party of Greece, and the nationalist Hellenic Solution and Niki parties voted against.
The law takes effect on January 1, 2027. Social media companies operating in Greece will be required to verify the age of their users and block anyone under 15 — and they face harsh penalties if they fail to comply. Mitsotakis has said the platforms have about two and a half months to devise an age-check system that respects users’ privacy.
How the checks are supposed to work
Under the bill, the burden of proof falls squarely on the platforms. Each service must block access when it knows with certainty that a user is below the age limit — and where age cannot be established reliably, it must ask the user to verify.
The mechanism Greece has in mind leans on digital tools the state already runs. A platform would display a QR code for the user to scan with the Kids Wallet or Gov.gr Wallet apps — Greece’s government digital wallets — which would confirm only whether the user is above or below the threshold, not their date of birth. The bill does not make any single app mandatory: platforms can use equivalent methods, as long as they meet European standards for reliability, proportionality and privacy protection.
Two things are notable. First, the ban covers existing accounts, not just new sign-ups — and parental consent will not override it. Second, age will be counted by birth year rather than birthday: when the law takes effect, children born in 2013 or later fall under the ban, while those born in 2012 count as having reached 15. Oversight is split between the National Council for Radio and Television and the Hellenic Data Protection Authority.
The fight inside parliament
The fiercest argument in the chamber was not really about whether social media is bad for children — there is broad agreement in Athens that it can be — but about the enforcement machinery. Opposition parties attacked the age-verification mechanism and its guarantees for personal data protection, calling the measures partial, lacking sufficient scientific backing, and premature ahead of European Union regulations on the matter.
Minister of State Akis Skertsos, who steered the bill, rejected that framing outright. He called the regulation “necessary, effective, compatible with community law, and proportionate” — and accused the opposition of a “superficial, sterile, and irresponsible” attitude during the debate. He also pushed back at PASOK’s claim that the government was using child protection for electoral purposes.
Mitsotakis himself launched the idea in April, and did so on the platform the law targets: he took to TikTok — hugely popular with young Greeks — to call the ban a “difficult but necessary” measure. Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis cited a survey of 2,500 school pupils in which a quarter reported using social media excessively, and one in five said they felt nervous or insecure and had trouble concentrating when they did not have access to their phone. As the government puts it, it is “standing by parents” to help curb the endless scrolling that, it says, deprives children of sleep, concentration and time with their friends.
Greece is not alone
This is now a global regulatory wave. Australia was the first country to impose such a ban, barring under-16s last year. France passed a similar law that was struck down by the country’s Constitutional Council in August. An AFP tally puts the number of countries that have passed comparable laws at more than 20.
The European Union is moving in parallel. In September, the European Commission presented its EU Kids Act, a bloc-wide proposal that would ban social media for under-13s and require users to be at least 15 to create their own accounts; Greece is among seven EU member states working with the Commission on an age-verification solution. And the regulatory pressure on the platforms is mounting on other fronts too — in the United States, Meta was recently ordered to pay a $25 billion fine in New Mexico over privacy claims.
Why this matters beyond Greece
Greece, a southern European country of around 10 million people, is now the first EU member state to put a hard statutory ban on children’s social media use into law. That makes it a live test case for the question every government is asking: can age verification work at scale, and can it work without turning the internet into an ID checkpoint?
If Athens actually enforces the law in January — and survives the legal challenges critics already predict — other EU capitals are likely to follow, and the negotiations over the EU Kids Act in Brussels will happen under real pressure rather than in the abstract. If enforcement stumbles on the same practical problems skeptics keep raising — teenagers spoofing their age, privacy risks from the verification itself — the result will be equally instructive. Either way, the experiment has now begun.
