Greece Passes Under-15 Social Media Ban for January 2027

Greece has passed legislation that will bar children under 15 from social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X. The law is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027, placing Greece among the early European Union countries to pursue a broad age-based social-media restriction.

The measure was backed by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s majority government despite opposition from minority parties. Mitsotakis has characterized the decision as difficult but necessary, while Digital Governance and AI Minister Dimitris Papastergiou argued that waiting for an ideal Europe-wide answer was not an adequate response to the problem.

For platforms, the central practical requirement is not simply changing a minimum-age line in terms of service. Services covered by the law will be required to use proportionate and reliable age-verification methods. That makes implementation the real test of the policy: a rule can set an age boundary, but enforcement depends on whether platforms and families can establish that boundary without creating an unnecessary new pool of sensitive personal information.

What Greece’s law covers

The legislation applies to major social-media services, with TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X named as examples. Children under 15 are the group targeted by the ban. The law’s effective date is January 1, 2027, giving platforms, government systems and parents time before the restriction begins.

Noncompliance can lead to fines under the European Union’s Digital Services Act framework. The Digital Services Act is an EU rulebook for online intermediary services that includes obligations and enforcement mechanisms for digital platforms. In this case, the important point is that Greece’s policy is not framed as a request for voluntary parental controls: it carries potential penalties for services that do not meet the required obligations.

Greece has already taken a separate step involving young people and technology in schools, having prohibited mobile phones in schools in 2024. The social-media measure goes further because it concerns access to online platforms rather than phone use during school hours.

Age verification is the hard part

“Age verification” means a process designed to determine whether a person falls above or below an age threshold. It does not necessarily mean that a platform must learn every detail of a user’s identity. Greece’s plan is intended to lean on state-backed apps called Kids Wallet and Gov.gr, which parents would download and pair with a child’s device to block access.

The government says these tools are designed to minimize the data involved through the use of age tokens. An age token can be understood as a limited confirmation of an eligibility fact—such as whether a user is old enough—rather than a routine disclosure of the user’s full personal profile. The stated objective is to allow an age check while reducing the personal data revealed in the process.

Related coverage includes Greece Sets January 2027 Start for Under-15 Social Media Ban.

That distinction matters. A straightforward but data-heavy approach might ask people to hand over identifying documents directly to every service they use. Greece’s proposed token model instead aims to answer a narrower question: is this account holder within the permitted age group? In principle, a narrower answer can limit disclosure. In practice, the usefulness of the system will turn on how reliably the token and parent-linked device arrangement prevent access, while still keeping personal data collection to a minimum.

There is a built-in tension in almost every age-gating plan. A weak check is easy to evade; a highly intrusive check may raise privacy concerns. Greece’s legislation explicitly calls for methods that are both proportionate and reliable, signaling that neither extreme is supposed to be the goal. The policy’s eventual credibility will depend on how that balance is interpreted and applied.

What parents and platforms may need to do

Parents are expected to have a direct role in the Greek system because the state-backed Kids Wallet or Gov.gr apps would be paired with a child’s device. Rather than placing the entire responsibility on a platform’s sign-up form, the approach links enforcement to a device-level parental tool.

Parents: would need to download and pair the applicable state-backed app with their child’s device in order to block covered social-media access.
Platforms: would need to deploy age-verification approaches that meet the law’s reliability and proportionality requirements.
Government systems: would need to support age-token use while honoring the stated privacy and data-minimization goals.
Regulators: would need to determine whether services are complying and, where needed, pursue penalties under the Digital Services Act framework.

Those are distinct jobs, and a breakdown in any one of them could affect the policy’s results. A parent-facing tool may be available, for example, but its intended protections require device pairing. A platform may add an age gate, but it must still be considered sufficiently reliable under the law. The arrangement is therefore more complex than a single switch that simply turns social media off for everyone below a specified age.

A national law with an EU-wide ambition

Mitsotakis has said that Greece wants to encourage the European Union to move in the same direction. That ambition matters because major social platforms operate across borders, while the EU provides a shared legal environment for many aspects of platform regulation.

The European Commission has introduced an EU Kids Act, but its outright prohibition applies to children under 13 rather than under 15. Greece’s law therefore uses a higher age threshold than that proposed EU-wide ban. The difference illustrates a key policy choice: a common European rule may establish a floor, while individual countries may seek stronger protections for a broader age range.

Whether other EU countries follow Greece’s lead is not established by this legislation. But the contrast between an under-13 EU proposal and Greece’s under-15 rule makes the country’s action significant in the ongoing debate over children’s access to social platforms.

Australia shows why implementation will matter

Australia was the first country to enact a full social-media ban for children, but age verification there has proved difficult to implement. That experience is a useful warning against treating the passage of a law as the end of the story.

The challenge is partly technical and partly administrative. Age limits must be verified in ways that work across devices and services. The process also needs to account for privacy, because an age-control system can itself create concerns if it gathers more information than it needs. Greece’s emphasis on age tokens is its stated answer to that concern, but the system’s effectiveness will only become clear once the 2027 requirements begin operating.

There is also a wider cultural question: rules aimed at reducing access may shift how young people, parents and platforms approach online communication, but the evidence here does not establish exactly how that will play out in Greece. What is clear is the policy design: access restrictions for under-15s, platform obligations, parent-linked state apps and penalties for failure to comply.

Age assurance and privacy-preserving access controls are likely to remain important across digital entertainment and online services, not only on social networks. The same broad policy questions—how to protect younger users, who verifies age, and how much personal information should be disclosed—will continue to matter wherever digital participation is regulated.

Technology policy also increasingly overlaps with creative industries. For another view of how major technology shifts are prompting questions around digital creation, see Shigeru Miyamoto’s comments on AI and what creation means. That is a different debate, but it reflects the same larger reality: rules, tools and platforms can reshape how people participate online.

For Greece, the immediate milestone is straightforward: on January 1, 2027, the country’s under-15 social-media restrictions are due to begin. The more difficult milestone will be building an age-verification system that is dependable enough to enforce the law and restrained enough to meet its privacy promise.