Erdogan has 15 days to sign the bill. The legislation enters into force six months after its publication in the Official Gazette. The main opposition CHP criticized this as a means of political censorship, not the protection of children.
Turkey has previously blocked Instagram, Roblox and limited platforms during the Imamoglu protests.
The Grand National Assembly of Turkey adopted the law on Wednesday evening Prohibition of social media for children under 15 years of agemaking the country the latest, and one of the largest by population, to introduce legislative age limits for social media access.
Under the law, social media companies, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, must implement age verification systems, block under-15s from creating accounts, and provide parental control tools to manage the accounts of 15- to 17-year-olds.
💜 of EU technology
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise founder Boris and some questionable AI art. Free in your inbox every week. Register now!
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has 15 days to sign the bill. If signed, it will enter into force six months after its publication in the Official Gazette. Online gaming companies must also appoint a representative based in Turkey to ensure compliance.
The immediate political catalyst is the Kahramanön school shooting on April 14, 2026, in which a 14-year-old boy killed nine students and a teacher at a high school in Kahramanön, southern Turkey, and committed suicide. Police later arrested 162 people accused of sharing images of the attack on the Internet. Investigators look into the criminal’s online activity to learn his motivations.
Erdogan 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 platforms have become, frankly, a dump.”
The parliamentary commission, which proposed the draft law, announced this in a report “Threats and Risks Awaiting Our Children in Digital Media.”
The operational mechanics of the law carry significant compliance requirements for platforms. Companies with more than 10 million daily users in Turkey, a threshold that covers all major platforms, must remove content deemed harmful within one hour of being notified in an emergency.
External services with more than 100,000 daily users must maintain a local representative. Enforcement is carried out through BTQ, Turkey’s communications watchdog.
Penalties range from advertising bans, effectively limiting the performance of the platform, to access speed limits and potential access bans. The speed-limiting mechanism is the same tool used by Turkey in previous enforcement actions against platforms that refuse to comply with orders to remove content.
Parallel to the 15-year-old law is a second legislative initiative that is more editorially significant for digital rights. The Turkish government has separately agreed with social media companies that all Turkish citizens, not just minors, must verify their identity in order to use social media accounts.
The exact mechanism of this identity verification system has not been disclosed, and it is not yet known how the platforms will technically implement it. Turkish official Merve Gürlek, who announced the agreement, made a statement on April 3; further details of the legal framework are still being developed.
Ending social media anonymity for all Turkish users is a completely different type of intervention than a 15-year-old age limit, and has obvious implications for political speech.
The opposition Republican People’s Party CHP, which is Turkey’s main secular opposition, voted against the project citing the need to protect children. “not with bans, but with rights-based policies.”
This is a standard liberal criticism of age-based social media bans, but in the Turkish context it carries additional weight given the documented record of government use of platform restrictions for political purposes.
In 2025, online communication was widely restricted during demonstrations in support of Istanbul’s jailed opposition mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. Instagram was blocked in 2024 after a controversy over Hamas-related content.
Roblox was banned, Turkish officials said, citing inappropriate sexual content and as a separate official described “propaganda of homosexuality.”
A law passed by Parliament is not in itself an instrument of censorship; but it expands and formalizes the regulatory infrastructure through which the government controls what Turks can access online.
The Turkish law joins the rapidly expanding international landscape of social media age restrictions. Australia’s under-16 ban comes into effect in December 2025.
Norway announced on Friday He said he plans to legislate a ban for under-16s by the end of 2026. Indonesia has imposed restrictions on the access of children under the age of 16 to platforms that expose minors to pornography, cyberbullying and drug addiction. France has age verification requirements for social media.
The UK Online Safety Act imposes damage prevention duties on platforms. Turkey’s approach differs in two ways: it combines a child protection measure with a requirement for universal identity verification, which no comparable democracy has yet implemented, and it introduces it in a political environment where the infrastructure for platform restriction is already in place against political opposition.
Whether the legislation will function primarily as a protection for children or primarily as a new layer of state control over digital speech will largely depend on how the CBI exercises its enforcement powers in the coming years.
