Teen Social Media Bans Are Surging Across Europe, But Can They Work?

The U.K., Spain, Greece and others all seem to be moving ahead with bans, as France, Denmark and Austria consider moves.

By Jim Vorel  |  February 16, 2026

In the little more than two months since the nation of Australia put the world’s first comprehensive social media ban for minors (under 16) into effect, there has been unmistakable momentum among the rest of the western world to seemingly follow in its footsteps. In Europe in particular, various world powers are either mulling the prospects of social media bans over, or directly working to craft legislation to bring it about. The United Kingdom, Spain, Greece and Slovenia have all confirmed they’re working on bans that could go into affect as soon as this year, while nations such as France, Denmark and Austria don’t seem to be far behind in their own deliberations. The fragmented U.S. faces a more complex challenge, although at least 25 states have introduced legislation or debate on teen social media bans. The Australian legislation, naturally, is an often-cited piece of important precedent in these debates, although perhaps not mentioned quite so often is the actual efficacy (or lack thereof) of what Australia has done. Which is to say: Has the ban actually worked in Australia, even a little bit? And if not, can it be made to work better elsewhere?

Those questions are difficult to answer without comprehensive data, as all sides of a social-media-for-teens debate are likely to simply seize on whichever anecdotal cases back up their point. For those in favor of the bans, it’s not hard to find a teenage Australian girl who says the ban has made her feel more free, less inescapably tethered to the expectation to be connected to the news cycle and hive mind at every hour of the day. At the same time, though, it’s just as easy to find countless Australian teens who merely shrug or laugh off the idea that anything has fundamentally changed. As one quintessentially teenage-sounding 14-year-old boy put it to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “I thought the ban would be, like, way more strict, but it ended up being really, like, chill, like nothing happened. It’s completely useless.”

That eloquent young man found he needn’t have worried, given that the tools the social media companies are using to ostensibly verify age are inherently easy to bypass, even without doing anything tricky. On Snapchat, for instance, the 14-year-old was instructed to complete a face scan to prove he was over 16. He did, and the app simply mistook him as being older than he was. For Instagram, meanwhile, he needed to improvise slightly: “Instagram, I needed to show my driver’s license because it wasn’t letting me use my face. So I got my friend’s driver’s license, and then I used it, and then it worked, so now I have all social media.”

What they’ve created in Australia, then, largely seems to be a system that only really weeds out those underage users who choose to be weeded out, whether because they inherently want to obey the law or take advantage of a pretext to ditch social media. Those millions of teens who are among the reported 4.7 million accounts that were deactivated in early December, who still want to be present on social media apps, have seemingly universally found ways back onto the apps without much difficulty. Many outlets have been interviewing Australian teens on their experience, and although you’ll find cases of those who have left social media behind and those who have circumvented the system, what you won’t find is kids saying they tried to circumvent the system and failed to do so. For many kids it seems to be as simple as say, using fake birthdays, or photos of other individuals, or VPNs to pretend to be outside of Australia. Other apps, meanwhile, are simply not included in the restrictions to begin with, resulting in teen migrations to the likes of Discord or WhatsApp as their new hubs. The Australian government admits that this is not meant to be some kind of overnight fix, with Julie Inman Grant, commissioner of the Australian Office of eSafety saying that the point of the policy was a reset of “cultural norms,” the benefits of which “may take years to fully manifest.”

There are likewise plenty of other users who argue that banning teens from social media merely serves to create generations without the tools to know how to use social media or discern truth from fiction later in life. What will happen to a user base dumped over a cliff and into the choppy waters of social media on the day they turn 16, after never using it before? As an elder Millennial, I must note that this was basically my own experience, but the social media world I entered in the mid-2000s can hardly be compared to the one that exists today in terms of its weaponized falsehoods and addictive algorithms.

Still, even with the clear holes in the Australian policy and legislation, that isn’t stopping numerous other major nations from both taking notice and considering how such a ban could be refined to be potentially more effective. In fact, the concept of the bans tends to be fairly popular in many of these electorates: In the U.K., The Guardian reports that since the Australia ban went into effect, more than 235,000 people in the U.K. have written to their MPs calling for a similar ban. In Greece, public polling recently suggested at as many as 80% of respondents were in favor of a government-proposed ban on social media for those less than 15 years old. In France, President Emmanuel Macron likewise declared that a social media ban for children was necessary, saying that the brains of Gen Alpha in France “are not for sale.” One wonders if there’s a certain geopolitical impetus here as well: Who could blame an international parent for not really wanting their kid to have social media accounts, when the Trump administration in the U.S. wants every foreign tourist to surrender five years of social media data?

In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has launched a consultation on a social media ban, targeting children under the age of 16, with legislation tailored to begin only months after the government sets out its proposals by June. This ban would support the Online Safety Act passed in 2023, which stands as one of the most strict pieces of international digital safety legislation, albeit one with a few large loopholes. Most notably, the act was written without language to regulate one-on-one exchanges with AI chatbots “unless they share information with other users,” a loophole that would now be closed. The U.K. is already in the process of investigating and potentially banning Twitter’s AI chatbot Grok, following the scandal involved in Grok consistently generating sexualized images of minors on command. That would follow bans on Grok already enforced in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

Especially combative language, meanwhile, has been generated by the push for a social media ban for users under the age of 16 in Spain, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vowing at the World Governments Summit in Dubai that “We will protect them from the digital Wild West.” That ban is currently working its way through the Spanish legislature, the Cortes Generales.

“Today, our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone,” Sánchez said, saying that the digital space was rife with “addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation and violence.” He also referred to the country needing to develop and employ age verification systems that are “not just check boxes, but real barriers that work,” potentially invoking the toothlessness of the Australian law. Sánchez likewise vowed that like the U.K., the country would “investigate and prosecurte the crimes committed by Grok, TikTok and Instagram,” saying that companies would no longer be “hiding behind code and claiming that technology is neutral.”

You can perhaps guess without me telling you how the likes of Elon Musk reacted to the above quotes. On his own platform, the world’s richest man–who is extremely in favor of Twitter frying people’s brains and the right of his social media network to distribute as much CSAM as its AI cares to do–lashed out at the Spanish Prime Minister directly, calling him “dirty” and “a tyrant” for wanting to take a hand in limiting kids’ exposure to Grok’s sexualized content.

“Dirty Sánchez is a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain,” Musk wrote. “Sánchez is the true fascist totalitarian.”

Musk, obviously, is projecting: A smut peddler and fake free speech activist who wields supreme power over Twitter and casually bans and represses his detractors, calling someone else a tyrant. That said, it’s a fair question whether the Australia-style bans being pushed through Europe and beyond will simply face the same hurdles to effectiveness as they did down under. Just look at this testimonial from one 14-year-old Australian girl who details how the ban ultimately ended up exposing her to far more adult content than before:

The restrictions didn’t interfere with me and my friends’ interactions via social media at all. We all just deleted some of our old accounts a couple of days before the restrictions kicked in and created new ones with fake birthdays about a week after. I’ve got new accounts on TikTok and Snapchat, and Instagram hasn’t flagged my old account as underage yet. It was so much easier than we thought it would be. No one I know was even subjected to facial recognition when they started a new account. Now that the platforms think I’m over 18 I have completely unfiltered access to all the content that might have been previously left out of my feed because of content restrictions. I definitely have more videos coming up on my feed around geopolitical instability and more violent coverage.

Any legislation of this kind is always going to be rife in these types of unintended consequences–the question is whether it’s worthwhile to try anyway, in the hopes that we will ultimately help more young people than we hurt by limiting at least some of their exposure to the synapse-blasting effects of social media addiction.

WUNRN

Teen Social Media Bans Are Surging Across Europe, but Can They Even Work?