SafeNeat
BlogNewsPlatformsHelpLog inStart free trial
News

The UK wants to ban under-16s from social media. The rest of Europe is right behind.

7 min readInternet Matters

For years, the debate about children and social media was a debate about advice: how much screen time, which apps, what age. In 2026 it stopped being advice and started becoming law. The United Kingdom has set out plans to ban under-16s from the major platforms, and it is far from alone. From Athens to Oslo, governments across Europe are writing the same idea into their statute books at the same time.

Here is what is actually being proposed, country by country, and the one thing every single one of these laws quietly leaves for parents to handle.

What the UK is planning

The UK government’s proposal, explained in detail by the child-safety charity Internet Matters, splits children into two groups:

  • Under-16s would be blocked from the major platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, X and YouTube. They would not be able to message strangers (including inside games), host livestreams, or use romantic and sexual AI chatbots.
  • 16 and 17-year-olds would keep their accounts, but with strong protections switched on by default: an overnight curfew from midnight to 6am, autoplay off, personalised feeds off, and the same limits on livestreaming and stranger contact. Teens could change these, but they start protected.

The timeline is deliberate rather than instant. Legislation is expected before the end of 2026, with the rules taking effect in spring 2027. Fines will land on the platforms, not on children or parents, and Ofcom, the UK’s online-safety regulator, will enforce them. Crucially, simply typing in a birth year will no longer be enough: platforms will have to run "robust" age checks. The Prime Minister has openly admitted the obvious limit, that a determined teenager can still reach for a VPN.

Greece is already a step ahead

If the UK is the loudest voice, Greece is one of the fastest movers, and for a Greek family this is the part that matters most. The Greek prime minister has announced that from 1 January 2027, children under 15 will be barred from the "endless scroll" platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. The line is drawn by birth year, so children born from 2012 onward fall under it. Messaging and video, WhatsApp, Viber, Messenger and YouTube, are not covered.

What makes the Greek approach distinctive is the tool behind it. Age is checked through Kids Wallet, a parental-control app inside the state’s Gov.gr Wallet that was originally built to stop minors buying tobacco and alcohol. When a child tries to sign up, the platform receives only a token confirming the user is over 15. It learns nothing else: not the name, not the identity, not the date of birth. The Greek prime minister has gone further still, calling for a single European "digital age of majority" set at 15, with platforms re-checking age twice a year.

The whole continent is moving at once

This is not a handful of countries acting alone. As of spring 2026, 23 of the EU’s 27 member states were drafting their own rules, and the European Commission has said it will publish a Europe-wide proposal in September 2026, built around phased access by age group. A few of the national moves:

  • France passed a law in January 2026 requiring platforms to turn away new under-15 users and delete existing under-15 accounts, from the September 2026 school year.
  • Denmark plans to ban under-13s outright and require parental consent for 13 to 15-year-olds, enforced through its national electronic ID.
  • Spain is preparing an under-16 ban, with its prime minister describing social media as a "failed state" where the rules are ignored.
  • Norway is consulting on stopping platforms from serving under-15s at all.

The quiet revolution: proving age without giving up privacy

Buried inside all of this is a genuinely important idea. To check a child’s age without turning the internet into a checkpoint that demands everyone’s ID, Europe is building age verification on zero-knowledge proofs. The EU’s own age-verification app, feature-ready since April 2026 and interoperable with the coming EU Digital Identity Wallet, lets a person prove they are over a certain age while revealing nothing else about themselves. Greece’s Kids Wallet works on the same principle with its age tokens.

It is worth pausing on why that matters. The instinctive way to enforce an age limit is to collect more data about children: scan faces, upload documents, log identities. Europe is deliberately choosing the opposite, prove the one fact that is needed and keep everything else private. That is the same principle SafeNeat is built on. We help you protect your child without reading their private data, because protection and surveillance are not the same thing.

What every one of these laws leaves for parents

Read the fine print across all of these countries and the same gap appears in every one of them. These laws operate at the front door, at the moment a child signs up for an account. They decide who is allowed in. They say almost nothing about what happens next, on the device, across the dozens of apps and browsers a child actually uses every day.

And notice what the bans do not touch. In Greece, WhatsApp, Viber and YouTube are explicitly excluded. Everywhere, private messaging, games and AI chatbots sit outside the headline. Existing accounts, VPNs, a friend’s login, a borrowed birth year, all of it survives the law. The barrier goes up on paper. On the phone in your child’s hand, most of the day is unchanged.

That last stretch, from a national policy to a child’s real behaviour at 9pm on a Tuesday, is the part no regulation can reach. It belongs to families. It is exactly where SafeNeat works:

  • See what your child is genuinely using, and for how long, instead of guessing.
  • Set screen-time limits and schedules that actually hold, including quiet hours for sleep.
  • Filter and block content across every app and browser, not just at one sign-up screen.
  • Get an alert when something needs your attention, so you can start a conversation, not a confrontation.

And because SafeNeat is built privacy-first, with end-to-end encryption, what you learn about your child stays inside your family. It is never sold to advertisers or left readable on a server, the same standard Europe is now writing into law.

The takeaway for parents

The wave of 2026 is real and, on balance, welcome. Putting the burden of age checks on billion-dollar platforms instead of on families is the right direction, and privacy-preserving verification is a genuinely good design. But two things are true at once. These laws are written for a world that arrives in 2027, and even then they govern the sign-up page, not the sofa. The families who pair sensible boundaries with tools that work on the actual device are the ones who will not be left waiting on a law, or caught out when a determined teenager finds the way around it.

Sources

Want the right limits without the daily battles?

SafeNeat sets the right limits automatically, based on your child’s age.

Try it free