Greece has approved a ban on social media for children under 15, Heise reports, making it the latest European government to legislate an age floor rather than rely on parental consent. The decision caps a four-month stretch in which the continent stopped treating minors' platform access as a design question and started treating it as statute.

The sequence matters. On 14 October the German government agreed key points for a social-media ban covering minors. In August, France's top constitutional court struck down that country's own under-15 ban, holding that a blanket prohibition collided with freedom of expression. Greece has now written the blunter instrument into law anyway — which makes the French ruling less a precedent than a warning label.

Why the turn: Australia's under-16 restriction, which took effect in December 2025, converted a long-running academic argument into a live national experiment. Once one democracy accepted an age floor, the political cost of proposing one fell sharply. Platforms have also spent two years shipping minor-safety features that doubled as admissions the defaults were wrong.

The unresolved problem is arithmetic. An age floor is not a policy, it is an estimation task performed several hundred million times a day. The available methods each charge a different price. Uploading identity documents is accurate and creates the single richest identity honeypot a platform could build, against the GDPR's data-minimisation principle. Facial age estimation keeps the document at home but is probabilistic, performs unevenly across skin tones and age bands, and still processes biometric data. Device- and app-store-level signals — an account flagged as belonging to a minor, an OS-declared age bracket — are cheap and private but trivially wrong whenever a child uses a parent's handset.

Then there is circumvention. VPNs cost nothing, borrowed accounts cost nothing, and a determined 13-year-old outranks a compliance team. Australia's rollout has already produced the predictable reports of children migrating to unlisted apps and voice chat inside games — spaces the law does not name and regulators do not staff.

The legal architecture is unsettled too. The EU's Digital Services Act requires platforms to take appropriate and proportionate measures for minors but sets no minimum age; national bans now go further, and it is not obvious how a Greek age gate interacts with a risk assessment drafted in Dublin. France's court has shown what happens when the two collide, and the European Commission has spent the year signalling it would rather harmonise than adjudicate 27 separate floors.

What to watch, in order: whether Greece publishes a named platform list or a functional definition; which enforcement body gets the job and what it can fine; and whether platforms answer with a Greek-only gate or a single EU-wide age-assurance layer — the difference between a national experiment and a de facto European standard. The German key-points paper and whatever emerges from Brussels will decide whether Greece is an outlier or the template.

Until then, the honest summary is that Europe has agreed on the principle and not on the plumbing. A ban that cannot be enforced cheaply and privately will be enforced expensively and intrusively, or not at all.

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