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France and Spain want to raise the minimum age for social media. Young people and experts aren’t convinced it will work.
Aoife White | 20/02/2026 originally published here
Charlotte (not her real name) turns 13 in a few months. When she does, she’ll finally be able to sign up for TikTok and Instagram – bright, shiny apps that all her friends already talk about.
French president Emmanuel Macron would like her to wait two more years until she turns 15. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez would like her to wait until she’s 16. Part of the German government would like her to wait until she’s 14.
Charlotte, who lives in Belgium, is horrified. “Sixteen is, like… You’re quite old then,” she said, pulling a face as she talked to The European Correspondent.
About half of the kids she knows have TikTok, she estimates, and many of them aren’t yet 13. Their favourite app for messaging is WhatsApp.
She has both, with her parents’ permission.
But adults are worried about how much time young people are spending on social media and what they may be viewing. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has linked increased social media use to a surge in self-harm and anxiety among teenage girls.
It has also been blamed for increasing mental health problems among teenagers, such as rising levels of depression, body image issues, and sleep problems.
Surveys show that many teens encounter harmful content online, from pro-eating disorder material to violent videos and harassment in group chat. Education may be affected too; reading scores across Europe have fallen.
Public opinion is supportive of action. According to the 2025 Eurobarometer, over 90% of Europeans believe protecting children online is a matter of urgency, not least in relation to social media’s negative impact on mental health (93%), cyberbullying (92%) and the need for effective ways to restrict access to age-inappropriate content (92%).
Platforms themselves acknowledge the problem and increasingly use age-verification tools. WhatsApp and Snapchat have an age limit of 13 in the EU.
Many tech platforms try to check the age of users by analysing a selfie. TikTok, Google and Meta – the owner of Instagram – also look at what kind of content the user is watching to guess their age.
TikTok says it removes about six million underage accounts every month globally and will now roll out tougher checks in the EU.
But enforcement is weak, and none of this is a problem for kids who really want to get online, since it’s mostly based on self-declaration.
“Even people who aren’t 13, they just make accounts. They get banned, but they make a new account, so they lie,” Charlotte said. “A friend of mine had her sister’s photo as her profile photo so that she didn’t get banned.”
Europe’s discussion follows Australia. The government there banned social media for under-16-year-olds in December, which led to nearly five million social media accounts being shut down.
Jo Orlando, an Australian author and researcher in digital wellbeing, said there’s a lot of pressure on governments to do something about kids and safety online.
”A ban is a very visible thing that a government could do and show their people that, hey, look, we’re doing something!” she told the European Correspondent.
The ban didn’t lead to drastic changes. Orlando said she hadn’t talked to anyone under 16 who had completely quit social media, often because they still had extra accounts that hadn’t been deleted.
”They seem to get around the age verification very, very easily,” she said. “Get your older brother to do it, parents were doing it for their kids, or people were putting on makeup to look a bit older.”
The ultimate effect means that ”kids are flying in the face of new legislation,” she said. It’s harmful if so many are asking themselves already what laws they feel like obeying.
”It leads to a mistrust of government,” she said.
The ban has divided the country, she said, with some parents happy to have help curbing social media use and others resenting government interference in child-rearing.
While EU governments are in charge of national age limits for social media use, the European Parliament called in November 2025 for a harmonised EU-wide digital minimum age of 16. They would allow 13-16-year-olds access with parental consent.
The European Commission is more cautious. Tech sovereignty commissioner Henna Virkkunen told a press conference that the EU was still gathering evidence on age controls and digital experts would report back this summer on their findings.
“We prefer to have a European approach when we are setting that kind of minority age,” Virkkunen said.
She also stressed that there needed to be a clear way of enforcing an age limit, which was initially missing with the rapid rollout of the Australia ban. Five EU countries are currently testing an EU age verification app with tech platforms to check the age of users.
Thomas Yaqoubi Reboul, 27, is campaigning against the French social media ban with the youth rights group Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim.
Politicians who grew up without the internet ”are regulating for people that only know this way of life,” he said.
”Social media is the public space of today,” he told TEC. ”We can’t exclude under-15s from the public sphere.” Instead of bans, he argues for making digital spaces safer – the way cities use pavements, traffic lights and speed limits rather than banning children from streets altogether.
Charlotte thinks social media is important and that she misses out because she doesn’t have TikTok and doesn’t know what other kids are talking about. The kids’ TV show she watches regularly shows TikTok clips of snowboarders or mountain climbers.
She does face curbs. Smartphones are banned at her Belgian school, and her parents restrict how long she can use her phone and block her from downloading apps. Those parental controls can be lifted when she turns 13.
Simeon de Brouwer, who works for the Brussels-based European Digital Rights campaign group, said children lie about their age because they have too much to gain by accessing social media. Instead of shielding only them, a better solution would be to create a safer online environment.
”A ban will just delay the problem for people who will be exposed anyway to the online harm that we’re not addressing,” he added.
There is already an EU law aimed at tackling online content and tech addiction: the Digital Services Act. This is supposed to protect children from algorithmic manipulation, addictive design and unwanted contacts.
TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are currently being investigated by the European Commission over how they may not protect children using their services. TikTok was told by the Commission this month that it needed to change addictive design features, such as its infinite scroll, and introduce screen time breaks.
Virkkunen stressed that the aim wasn’t to take the internet away from young people. Nearly all young people in Europe go online every day, she said.
”They have the right to safely seek information, learn, be connected and become engaged members of society,” she said.
