AI Regulation & Global
Greece to Ban Social Media for Under-15s From January 2027
Greece will ban social media for children under 15 from January 1, 2027, with Prime Minister Mitsotakis urging the EU to adopt a bloc-wide age verification framework.
Greece Sets January 2027 Social Media Ban for Under-15s
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has announced that Greece will prohibit children under 15 from using social media platforms starting January 1, 2027, and is urging the European Commission to adopt a bloc-wide age-verification framework to enforce similar rules across the EU. The policy is one of the toughest yet in Europe and could set a template other member states follow.
Mitsotakis cited rising rates of anxiety, sleep disruption, and compulsive use among Greek teenagers, and called out the addictive-by-design features of mainstream platforms. The ban will apply to apps that rely on algorithmic feeds and infinite scrolling, with enforcement expected to flow through national app stores and ISP-level controls.
"We are not against technology. We are against products engineered to capture children's attention and monetize their wellbeing." — Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece
Implications for the EU
If the European Commission follows Greece's lead, platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube Shorts could face a unified age-verification regime across all 27 EU member states. That would substantially raise compliance costs and could force platforms to build child-safe alternative experiences — or pull services entirely for under-15 users in Europe.
The move comes days after TikTok committed another €1 billion to a second Finland data center, part of its Project Clover data-localization push designed to address EU regulatory concerns.
What This Means for Platforms
Platforms operating in Europe should expect age-verification and duty-of-care compliance to become standard product requirements. That translates into demand for engineers who can build privacy-preserving identity flows, content-risk classifiers, and under-13/under-15 account management systems. For job seekers, trust-and-safety roles — especially those with regulatory fluency — are among the fastest-growing in European tech hubs.