Austria is set to join other European Union countries in banning young people from accessing social media.
Yesterday, education minister Christoph Wiederkehr said he might consent to a ban.
Wiederkehr’s party, the small liberal Neos party, had previously opposed plans for a national ban brought forward by its two larger coalition partners, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), favouring a joint EU-wide ban.
Now Wiederkehr says he could imagine agreeing to a temporary national solution: “If it is technical and legally possible – but this is only an option if we can ensure that it works and we can also enforce and execute our laws vis-à-vis TikTok in China.”
The minister added that he sees enforceability as the key issue: “The difficult question is that of technical feasibility and how to guarantee that platform providers such as Meta or TikTok will comply. That is why we at Neos consider a European approach to be very important here.”
The current plans, outlined by the office of Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker (ÖVP) in January, foresee a ban on social media for children under 14 years of age that should come into effect later in 2026.
Further details – such as which platforms the ban would cover and how platforms would verify their users’ age – are still under discussion.
Austria is not the only country to mull limiting young people’s access to Facebook, TikTok and the like. Social media bans for youngsters are on the rise all across the EU.
In Germany, the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) of Chancellor Friedrich Merz will discuss an initiative for a social media ban for under-16-year-olds during the party conference on February 20 and 21.
The proposed ban would cover platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook and serve to protect young people from “hate speech, mobbing, psychological pressure and harmful content”, its proponents say.
CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann said: “I am in favour of social media only from 16 onwards. Children have a right to childhood. On social networks they are exposed to content which they cannot understand or process.”
France’s national assembly approved a social media ban for youngsters under 15 on January 26. The bill also prohibits the use of mobile phones in by high school students on school premises. The ban will most probably come into effect this year.
On January 20, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said his country would also introduce a ban on social media access for under-16-year-olds.
Similar legal initiatives are under way in Denmark and Greece. In Portugal, legislators have proposed a law that would require parental consent for 13 to 16-year-olds to access social media and mandate platforms to implement age verification and parental authorisation systems.
Some pioneers of social media bans, though, are backtracking already. On February 4, the Albanian Government decided to lift a ban on TikTok that had only been instated in March 2025 – after a 14-year-old had been stabbed to death by a peer following a dispute on social media.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said his country had reached an agreement with Chinese company Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, on the introduction of content filters.
According to news site Albania Daily News, officials said the ban had been ineffective as many users bypassed it using virtual private networks (VPNs).
