Erdŏgan has 15 days to sign the bill into law. This law comes into force six months after it is published in the Official Gazette. The main opposition party the CHP has criticized it as a political research tool rather than protecting children.
Turkey has blocked Instagram, Roblox, and restricted platforms during the İmamoglu protests.
Turkey’s Grand National Assembly passed a law late Wednesday banning social media for children under 15, making the country the latest, and one of the largest by population, to introduce legal age limits on social media access.
Under the law, social media companies including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram will be required to implement age verification systems, prevent under-15s from creating accounts, and provide parental control tools to manage accounts for 15- to 17-year-olds.
💜 for EU tech
The latest talk from the EU tech scene, a story from our genius founder Boris, and some incredible AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Register now!
President Recep Tayyip Erdŏgan has 15 days to sign the bill. If signed, it will enter into force six months after publication in the Official Gazette. Online gaming companies must also appoint a representative based in Turkey to ensure compliance.
Political activist Kahramanön school shooting on April 14, 2026, in which a 14-year-old boy killed nine students and teachers at a middle school in Kahramanön in southern Turkey before killing himself. Police then arrested 162 people suspected of sharing images of the attack online. Investigators are examining the perpetrator’s online activity for clues to his motivation.
Erdŏgan made the political connection clear in a televised speech on Monday: “We live in an age where some digital sharing apps are corrupting our children’s minds, and social media has become a waste.”
The parliamentary commission that proposed this law put it in a report titled “Threats and Dangers Awaiting Our Children in Digital Media.”
Legal operating systems have important compliance requirements for platforms. Companies with more than 10 million daily users in Turkey, a limit that covers all major platforms, must remove content deemed harmful within one hour of notification in an emergency.
External services with more than 100,000 daily users must retain a proxy. Law enforcement is the responsibility of Turkey’s telecommunications watchdog, BTK.
Penalties range from advertising bans to speed limits, which effectively limit the performance of the platform, to possible access restrictions. The speed-limiting mechanism is the same tool that Turkey has used in previous enforcement actions against platforms that have refused to comply with content removal orders.
Running alongside the under-15 law is the second most important piece of legislation in digital rights regulation. The Turkish government has reached a separate agreement with social media companies that requires all Turkish citizens, not just minors, to verify their identity to use social media accounts.
The exact mechanism of this identity verification system has not been disclosed, and how the platforms will technically implement it is unknown. Merve Gürlek, the Turkish official who announced the deal, made the announcement on April 3; other details of the draft law are still being drafted.
The end of social media anonymity for all Turkish users represents a very different type of intervention than the under-15 age limit and has obvious consequences for political discourse.
The opposition Republican People’s Party, CHP, Turkey’s main opposition party, voted against the bill, saying children should be protected. “not through prohibition but through rights-based policies.”
This is a common liberal criticism of age-based social media bans, but in Turkey’s case it carries more weight given the government’s documented record of using social media restrictions for political purposes.
Internet access was severely restricted during the 2025 protests in support of Istanbul’s jailed opposition mayor Ekrem İmamoglu. Instagram was blocked in 2024 following controversy over Hamas-related content.
Roblox was banned, with Turkish officials citing inappropriate sex and, separately, what an official described as “promoting homosexuality.”
A law passed by parliament is not itself an instrument of inspection; but it expanded and formalized the regulatory infrastructure through which the government controlled what Turkish people could access on the Internet.
The Turkish law joins the rapidly growing international field of social media age limits. Australia’s ban on under-16s came into force in December 2025.
Norway announced on Friday that it plans to end the ban on under-16s by the end of 2026. Indonesia has implemented restrictions on access by under-16s to platforms that expose children to pornography, cyberbullying, and addiction. France has age verification requirements on social media.
The UK Online Safety Act sets out harm prevention duties on platforms. Turkey’s approach is unique in two ways: it combines a child protection measure with a requirement to verify identity everywhere that has never been used in a democracy, and it introduces it in a political environment where the infrastructure of the ban is already used against the political opposition.
Whether the law works primarily as a protection for children or primarily as a new state layer over digital speech will largely depend on how the BTK uses its enforcement powers in the coming years.
