A wave of legislation aimed at keeping children off social media platforms is sweeping across multiple continents. In the space of eighteen months, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United Kingdom have either passed laws or announced firm plans to restrict children’s access to platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. Several more countries are close behind. The pace of change is striking. So too is the level of agreement across governments that otherwise share very little.
What is driving it? And what do the laws actually say? The reasons cited by governments vary in emphasis but share a common thread. Cyberbullying. Exposure to harmful content. The design features of platforms that are built to keep users scrolling for as long as possible. Mental health damage in children and teenagers. Sexual exploitation. Online fraud. These concerns have been building for years. What changed recently was the political willingness to act on them, partly driven by rising public pressure from parents and health professionals and partly by a series of high-profile incidents linking social media use to harm done to young people.
Australia moved first and went furthest. In December 2025 it became the first country in the world to ban children under 16 from holding accounts on major social media platforms. The list of affected services includes TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Threads, Twitch and Kick. Companies that fail to take reasonable steps to remove underage accounts face fines of up to $34 million. Since the law came into force, platforms have deactivated close to five million accounts identified as belonging to children.
Brazil followed. A law that came into force in March 2026 bans children under 16 from using social media without direct parental supervision. Platforms must verify ages through government identification and link underage accounts to a parent or legal guardian. The law also bans features designed to keep users watching automatically, such as videos that play without the user choosing them.
Indonesia introduced its own ban in March as well, blocking children under 16 from major platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Roblox. The country cited cyberbullying, financial scams and child sexual abuse as the core reasons for acting. TikTok and YouTube have since deactivated a combined total of more than 4.7 million underage accounts in Indonesia alone.
Malaysia made the same move on the 1st of June 2026. Platforms with more than eight million users in the country are required to block children under 16 from creating accounts and to verify ages through official identification systems. Platforms that fail to comply face financial penalties.
In Europe, the United Kingdom announced its intention on the 15th of June 2026. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government would ban children under 16 from social media platforms, describing the planned measures as going further than any country in the world. The legislation is expected to go before parliament before the end of the year, with protections potentially in force by spring 2027. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal will not be included.
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France’s National Assembly passed a bill in late January that would ban under-15s from social media. It still needs to pass the Senate before becoming law. President Emmanuel Macron has called for the process to be accelerated. Greece has announced a ban for children under 15 that is expected to take effect from January 2027. Denmark is working toward a similar restriction expected by mid-2026. Norway, Spain, Austria and Portugal are all at various stages of drafting or passing comparable legislation.
According to the reports, the evidence base behind these decisions remains contested. Some researchers argue that heavy social media use is genuinely harmful to young people’s mental development and emotional health. Others question whether the evidence supports the strong causal claims governments are making. What is not contested is that these platforms were designed to maximise the time users spend on them, and that the users who find it hardest to stop are often the youngest.
Enforcing these laws presents its own challenges. Most platforms have relied on users entering their own date of birth when creating an account. That approach is easily defeated by a child entering a false age. More robust systems, such as checking identity documents or using facial recognition, raise their own concerns about privacy and the collection of sensitive personal data from children. Governments are grappling with the fact that no verification method is both reliable and clearly safe for the people being verified.
The United States has not introduced a nationwide ban. Federal law already restricts data collection from children under 13. Several individual states have passed their own measures. Many of those have faced legal challenges on the grounds that restricting access to social media infringes on the right to free expression.
The global direction is clear. Governments on every inhabited continent are moving toward tighter controls on children’s access to social media. How well those controls can be enforced, and whether they achieve their stated aims, will be the defining questions of the next several years.
