On September 3, 2026, Córdoba deputy Carolina Basualdo of the Provincias Unidas bloc introduced a bill setting a "digital majority" at 15 for social media. Under-15s could hold a profile only with prior, free and informed parental consent. Platforms would have to verify ages and guarantee safe digital environments. The bill went to the Chamber of Deputies' Families, Childhood and Youth Committee and its Communications and Informatics Committee, according to Parlamentario.
The case for the bill
The strongest argument for it is that self-declared age gates do not work. A birthdate checkbox is a fiction every ten-year-old can type past. Reporting on the bill's rationale links intensive, unsupervised platform use to anxiety, depression and sleep problems in minors, plus exposure to grooming and cyberbullying (Economía Sustentable). Parlamentario cites a 2025 Unicef "Kids Online" finding that about half of Argentine minors show problematic use of the internet or devices. A parent who wants to say no currently has no legal backing against a platform that ignores the request. Moving responsibility from families alone to families, the state and companies is a defensible aim.
What the bill actually specifies
Reporting describes four mechanisms:
- A consent requirement for under-15 accounts.
- A duty to deploy age verification "beyond self-declaration."
- Fines of 100 to 100,000 Minimum Vital and Mobile Salaries (SMVM), with revenue earmarked for digital-citizenship programs.
- Possible partial or total suspension of a platform.
Parlamentario puts the SMVM at ARS 383,800 today. That makes the ceiling roughly ARS 38 billion and the floor roughly ARS 38 million, a thousandfold range. The text as reported gives no criteria for where in that range a violation falls.
The bill follows France's approach. According to Connexion France, both French chambers approved an under-15 ban on July 21, 2026. New accounts are barred from September 2026, and existing accounts must comply from January 2027. Verification tools must be approved by France's data protection authority. Left-wing MPs planned a challenge before the Constitutional Council.
The French design names a regulator-approved verification layer. The Argentine reporting does not.
The unanswered question: who enforces?
The reports I could verify do not name ENACOM, and they do not settle who would enforce the law. Economía Sustentable says an executive-branch agency designated by the President would oversee compliance, with 90 days to set technical mechanisms. It does not name that agency. This matters because the bill is going to the Communications and Informatics Committee, and ENACOM is the obvious candidate. ENACOM describes itself as the "Autoridad de Aplicación" of Law 27.078 (Argentina Digital) and Law 26.522 (audiovisual services), in Resolution 1467/2020 published in the Boletín Oficial. Those are telecom and broadcast statutes. They give ENACOM authority over network operators and licensees. Platforms such as TikTok or Instagram are not licensees under either law, so a platform-fining mandate would be a new power. A new power needs explicit statutory language, not inference.
There are three ways this could go:
- ENACOM. It has an existing sanctions apparatus but no track record supervising content platforms or age assurance.
- A new agency. It would be slower to stand up and a fresh target for capture or politicization.
- A child-protection body. It would know the subject matter but have no technical or telecom reach.
Legislators should choose among these in the text. Leaving the choice to a later decree invites the exact discretion that suspension powers should never have.
Why design matters more than the age line
This publication favors proportionate, evidence-based rules, and the sticking points here are narrower than the headline age. Three concerns stand out.
Suspension is a speech remedy. Blocking a platform "partially or totally" cuts off every Argentine user's expression, not only the minors at issue. Suspension should be a last resort. It should require a judicial order, not an administrative one, and be limited to repeated, documented non-compliance. A bill that says only "possible suspension" does not meet that bar.
Verification can undercut privacy. Specialist Mariana Savid Saravia of Fundación Lea warned in Perfil that verification forces users to hand over more personal data, which cuts against the privacy goal. She also argued the real problem is platform design, such as infinite scroll and recommendation algorithms. If verification means document uploads or face scans for every adult, Argentina would be building a national identity checkpoint for ordinary speech. Privacy-preserving, tokenized attestation approved by the data protection authority, as in France, is the minimum.
An unbounded fine range invites uneven enforcement. A thousandfold spread with no stated criteria gives a regulator large discretion and gives small or foreign services a reason to geo-block Argentina rather than risk it. That would hurt the local startups and mid-size communities the law never meant to target. Tiering by user numbers and by whether a company made a good-faith effort would match obligations to capacity.
What to watch
The bill is at the start of the committee stage, and nothing is binding. The committee should resolve three things before any floor vote: the named enforcer and its statutory basis, the verification standard and its privacy safeguards, and judicial review of suspension. If it does, Argentina can protect children without handing an agency an unchecked switch over the platforms its citizens use to speak.