Turkey’s Social Media Ban: a Familiar Playbook With a Troubling Subtext

Turkey’s parliament passed a law this week banning children under 15 from social media. Platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram will be required to block account creation for under-15s, install age-verification systems, and provide parental control tools. Platforms will have six months to comply. The law follows Australia, France, and others down a well-worn road. The child safety framing is sincere. The policy logic is not.

What the law actually does

The Turkish law amends Internet Law No. 5651 and introduces a two-tier system. Children under 15 face an absolute ban. Children aged 15 to 17 can access social media only through tailored, age-restricted versions of platforms with mandatory parental controls, content filters, and parental approval for any paid features.

That two-tier structure is presented as more sophisticated than Australia’s single-threshold model. In theory, it claims to align with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s position that states should respect the evolving capacities of children as they gradually acquire competencies, understanding, and agency. In practice, it still bars every child in Turkey from ordinary social media access until the age of 18, the same day they can stand for parliament.

The draft law also imposes obligations not just to prevent account creation but to avoid providing services altogether, which, unlike the Australian model, could be interpreted as restricting logged-out access to social media content, not just account-based access. That would be a significant extension: it would affect adults as much as children, since adults would need an account to access any content at all.

Age verification is required but not defined. The draft provides no details on the age-verification process. Mechanisms that rely on government-issued identification or biometric data raise valid privacy concerns, and whether those will be addressed in secondary regulation remains unclear.

The enforcement problem no one is solving

Whether age verification can be sufficiently effective remains a persistent question. Minors can bypass requirements using virtual private networks with minimal technical knowledge. An industry expert cited in Turkish reporting estimated that a ban might reduce under-15 social media use by roughly 10 percent. The remaining 90 percent would migrate to less regulated spaces, exactly the unintended consequence the law claims to prevent.

This is not a Turkish-specific critique. It applies to every jurisdiction that has gone down this path. The Australian ban is currently being challenged in court on the grounds that a child can be more effectively protected from online harm with an account than without one, because account-holders can be subject to content filters and settings that anonymous or logged-out users cannot. Turkey’s law does not resolve that logic. It repeats the error.

The context that does not fit the child safety frame

Turkey’s government has a recent record of restricting online platforms as tools of political dissent. For example, online communications were widely restricted during last year’s protests in support of Istanbul’s jailed opposition mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu.

That context matters. A law that grants Turkey’s communications regulator broad authority to impose bandwidth reductions and fines on platforms, combined with ambiguous language about what constitutes “harmful content,” is not only a child safety measure. It is infrastructure for platform control. The child safety framing is not wrong per se. But it certainly is incomplete.

Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has criticised the proposal, arguing that children should be protected not with bans but with rights-based policies. That is the right instinct, even if it comes without a fully formed alternative.

What a better framework would require

The emerging international consensus on banning children from social media rests on a category error, one we have examined before. Social media platforms function as a modern public square. They are how many people access current events, find employment, participate in public debate, and connect with others. Treating these platforms as inherently harmful, rather than as environments that require age-appropriate design and safety accountability, produces laws that exclude children from civic infrastructure rather than making that infrastructure safe.

The European Commission’s 2025 Guidelines on child safety under the Digital Services Act (DSA) take a different approach. The Guidelines describe parental control tools as complementary to safety-by-design measures, and specify that parts of social media services posing risks to minors should be made available only to verified adults, rather than excluding minors from platforms entirely. That is a proportionate framing. Age-appropriate design, platform accountability, and targeted restrictions on specific features or content types preserve children’s access to the public square while removing the features that cause harm.

Turkey’s law does not pursue that path. It is structurally identical to the Australian model it appears to admire: a blanket exclusion justified by harms that more precise regulation could address without the collateral damage.

What comes next

The law will face implementation challenges that secondary regulation will struggle to resolve. Age verification without privacy safeguards will generate its own controversy. The logged-out access question remains open. Platforms will have six months to comply with requirements that are still partially undefined.For the EU, Turkey’s law is a reminder that the social media ban trend is not confined to liberal democracies with functioning judicial oversight. The same legal template travels across contexts. When it lands in a country where platform regulation has previously served political ends, the child safety argument does not disappear. It just stops being the whole story.The EU has the tools: the DSA, the Guidelines, and a legal tradition grounded in children’s rights and freedom of expression. It can write a better story.

Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research