Greece has banned children under 15 from using social media, after its parliament approved a government bill on October 22 that is due to take effect on January 1, 2027.
The restriction covers platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, with others to be added later. It also applies to accounts Greek children already hold, which the platforms will have to re-verify.
New Democracy, the party of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was the only group to back the text both in committee and in the decisive vote. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and Course of Freedom opposed it from the committee stage, Greek Solution, Syriza and Niki joined them at the final hurdle and the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) abstained.
Age verification and the protection of personal data were the main points of friction, with the checks left to the platforms themselves. Opposition parties called the approach sweeping and piecemeal, said it lacked scientific backing and objected to Athens legislating before the European Union has agreed its own rules.
Akis Skertsos, the minister of state, said the law was necessary, proportionate and compatible with EU law, and rejected PASOK’s claim that the government was using child protection for electoral advantage. He pointed to earlier restrictions on tobacco and alcohol sales to minors, which he said the opposition had also declined to back.
Dimitris Papastergiou, the digital governance minister, defended the state-backed Kids Wallet application, which is tied to the citizens’ register and tells a platform only whether a user has turned 15. It hands over no date of birth and monitors no pages or messages, he said.
Enforcement rests on the Digital Services Act rather than on separate Greek penalties, with breaches referred to the regulator in the country where a platform is established or to the European Commission.
The Commission has stopped short of recommending a blanket ban and favours phased, supervised access for minors, while Greece works on an EU age-verification tool alongside Cyprus, France, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Denmark. Mitsotakis has pressed for a bloc-wide minimum age since April.
France became the first EU member state to adopt an under-15 ban in July, though its Constitutional Council struck the measure down in August as a disproportionate restriction on freedom of expression.
Polls have put Greek support for the ban at about 80 per cent. The government has already removed mobile phones from schools, and figures presented with the bill showed more than half of Greek middle-school pupils started using social media between the ages of 10 and 12.
