Greece has become one of the first European Union member states to put a hard age floor on social media use, with a bill that would bar anyone under 15 from accessing platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook starting 1 January 2027. The framework, unveiled on Monday by three government ministers, shifts the legal burden of checking a user's age onto the platforms themselves rather than leaving enforcement to parents or self-declared birth dates.
A legal threshold with teeth
The bill, presented by Minister of State Akis Skertsos, Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis and Digital Governance Minister Dimitris Papastergiou, will go before parliamentary committees on 13 October, with a plenary debate and final vote set for 22 October. Skertsos framed the measure as a response to algorithms built to maximise engagement among the youngest and most impressionable users, arguing that regulation must center on the health and development of minors rather than platform metrics. He also situated the Greek bill within a broader European push, describing it as a contribution to a common continental response rather than an isolated national experiment.
How age verification is meant to work
The technical core of the proposal rests on two government-backed tools, Kids Wallet and Gov.gr Wallet, which Papastergiou described as privacy-preserving by design. Rather than asking a teenager or a platform to hand over a birth certificate or identity document, the system is built around digital "age tokens" - credentials that confirm a user meets or fails to meet the 15-year threshold without revealing further personal data. In principle, a platform receives a yes-or-no signal, not a dossier.
Companies are not locked into a single method. The bill allows different technical solutions as long as they satisfy requirements set at the European level, meaning age checks must be accurate, resistant to manipulation, and functional under everyday conditions rather than only in controlled tests. That flexibility is a deliberate trade-off: it avoids forcing every platform onto identical infrastructure, but it also means the real-world reliability of these checks will vary by implementation and will only be tested once millions of young users start probing for ways around them.
Where this fits in EU digital law
Greece is not legislating in isolation. The bill is explicitly anchored in the EU's Digital Services Act, particularly Article 28, which addresses the protection of minors on online platforms. Enforcement will run through the DSA's cross-border cooperation mechanism rather than through Greek courts alone, meaning a complaint against a platform based in another member state would be forwarded to that country's competent authority rather than handled solely in Athens.
Domestically, oversight is split between three bodies: the National Telecommunications and Post Commission (EETT), acting as Digital Services Coordinator; the National Council for Radio and Television (ESR), covering relevant broadcasting-adjacent provisions; and the Hellenic Data Protection Authority (HDPA), responsible for personal data questions tied to the DSA. This layered structure reflects how closely child-safety rules now intersect with data protection law - age verification itself generates sensitive information that must be handled carefully, which is precisely why the government is emphasising minimal data collection through the token-based model.
What is actually at stake
The policy responds to a now-familiar set of concerns: anxiety and depression linked to heavy social media use, cyberbullying, disrupted attention and sleep, and the sense that recommendation algorithms are not neutral but engineered to maximise time on screen. Setting a fixed age limit is a blunter instrument than content moderation or design changes, but it is also easier to communicate and, in theory, easier to enforce consistently across platforms.
The real test will be implementation. An age limit is only as strong as the verification system behind it, and determined teenagers have historically found ways around digital gatekeeping, from borrowed credentials to falsified data. Greece's approach - anchoring enforcement in state-issued digital wallets rather than relying on platforms' own age-estimation tools - is a notable departure that other EU governments will be watching closely as the 2027 deadline approaches.