The Greek parliament has approved a law barring children under 15 from social media, passing the bill late on 22 October after a debate of more than sixteen hours, the state broadcaster ERT reported.
The restrictions take effect on 1 January 2027. Platforms including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are covered, with the law applying according to how a service functions rather than by name, a point reported by Proto Thema. This account follows The Next Web, which carried both reports.
New Democracy, the governing party, was the only party to vote for the bill. PASOK abstained. SYRIZA, Greek Solution, the Communist Party, Niki and Course of Freedom voted against, having challenged the restrictions on practical and legal grounds.
Platforms are made responsible for verifying the ages of their users. Where a platform cannot determine a user's age, it displays a QR code linked to Kids Wallet, a government application, which tells the platform only whether the user is over or under 15.
Platforms receive no name and no date of birth. "We do not give platforms any of our children's personal data whatsoever," the digital governance minister, Dimitris Papastergiou, said when the government presented the system.
Parents cannot grant permission for a child to use the platforms, and existing accounts are not exempt.
Oversight falls to Greece's broadcasting council and its data protection authority. For the largest services, enforcement sits with the European Commission under the Digital Services Act. The law introduces no new fines for children or for their parents.
Addressing parliament, the minister of state, Akis Skertsos, said: "We don't have any more time to waste." Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has put the platforms' compliance window at roughly two and a half months.
Greece is one of seven EU member states working with the European Commission on an age-verification tool. Australia's under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and France's Constitutional Council struck down its own under-15 ban on 14 August, ruling that it went too far in restricting freedom of expression.
It is worth setting out what the system asks of each party. The platform must establish the user's age. The platform may not be told the user's age. The platform is instead handed the answer, which is the one fact about a Greek child it is permitted to hold: that the child is a child.
This is the smallest quantity of knowing yet required by a European statute, and this newspaper considers it a model of restraint. A user arrives as a stranger, is examined, and leaves as a stranger who has been examined.
The allocation of blame is tidier still. There is no penalty for a child who signs up, and none for a parent who allows it. The only party capable of breaking Greece's child social media law is a platform.
A child who gets through has therefore done nothing wrong. Something wrong has nonetheless occurred, and it has occurred to the platform, which was obliged to know a fact that nobody was obliged to tell it.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has filed the one outstanding question. Where a service cannot determine a user's age, it must show a QR code. A child who simply declines to scan it has disclosed nothing, breached nothing, and remains, in the eyes of the platform, a person of no particular age.