Greece will keep under-15s off social media from January. Platforms, not parents, carry the can
Greek MPs passed the law overnight on 22-23 October, banning social media for children under 15 from 1 January 2027. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok must check every user's age, existing accounts included, and the state's Kids Wallet is one of the tools they can use.
Greece has gone from plan to statute. Parliament passed a ban on social media for children under 15 overnight on 22-23 October, and it takes effect on 1 January 2027. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis first floated the idea in April. Now it has a start date and someone on the hook.
It passed on a majority vote. Governing New Democracy backed it, PASOK abstained, and SYRIZA, the Communist Party and other opposition parties voted against.
Who has to comply
The most interesting part of the law is where it points the finger. If a 13-year-old has a TikTok account, it is not the parents who answer for it, it is the platform. Companies have to build reliable age checks, and not only for new sign-ups: accounts that already exist will have to be verified too.
The government names Facebook, Instagram and TikTok as examples, but the law covers any service where you create a profile to post and interact. Ordinary private messaging is not automatically treated as a social network, and the internet itself, educational sites and public digital services are untouched.
Mitsotakis told the companies they have roughly two and a half months to get their systems working.
Proving your age
Greece already has one piece of the puzzle. The state’s Kids Wallet and the Gov.gr Wallet are named as possible ways to confirm age, though the law does not make them compulsory and accepts other methods that meet the bar. Officials are also lowering expectations for day one: under-15 accounts will not all vanish at midnight on 1 January as if someone flipped a switch.
A European test case
Athens is not doing this alone. Greece is one of seven member states working with Brussels on a shared age-verification tool, and enforcement will also involve EU bodies under the digital services rules, the same rulebook behind the addictive-design charges against Meta. The wider framework sits on the European Commission’s page on protecting minors online.
None of this is guaranteed to survive. In August, France’s Constitutional Council struck down the French under-15 ban, largely over how it handled age checks. Greece now becomes the European case to watch, Portugal included, and its first real test arrives in a little over two months.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Jebulon / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
