On 23 October 2026 the Greek parliament passed a law barring children under 15 from social media, effective 1 January 2027, according to Al Jazeera. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told platforms they have about two and a half months to build age-verification systems that protect privacy. The law arrives just ten weeks after France's Constitutional Council struck down its own under-15 ban, and the contrast between the two is the most useful way to assess what Athens has done.
The case for acting
The case for the Greek law is strong and should be stated fairly. Parents face platforms engineered for engagement, and individual families cannot easily opt out when a child's whole class is online. Governments cite concerns about sleep, concentration, harassment and compulsive use. Australia has already moved, and Al Jazeera reports that about 20 countries now restrict minors' access to social media in some form. Waiting for perfect evidence while a generation grows up on these services is a defensible political judgment, and Greek voters appear to share it.
What France's court actually said
The French precedent is narrower than the headlines suggest, and it matters here. In Decision 2026-911 DC of 14 August 2026, the Council accepted the aims: protecting minors from addiction, isolation, and exposure to pornography, harassment or fraud. It still held Article 1 unconstitutional for four reasons visible in the text:
- The ban applied to any platform letting users communicate with each other, with no condition on features, content or demonstrated danger.
- It offered no way for parents to lift or limit the ban, and no assessment of an individual minor's age or maturity.
- It was therefore not "adaptée, nécessaire et proportionnée" to its objective.
- It implied, by itself, that every person, even an adult, must prove their age, yet set no conditions or limits on how that proof would work.
The Council ruled only on Article 1, so the rest of the French law was not reviewed.
Where Greece differs, and where it does not
Greece is not simply repeating the French text. According to ID Tech Wire's account, the law amends Law 5099/2024 with a new Article 4A that permits age checks through the government's digital wallet and the KidsWallet app without making either the exclusive method. Minister Dimitris Papastergiou says the app reveals only whether a user is above or below 15, not a date of birth. Supervision is split between the National Council for Radio and Television and the Hellenic Data Protection Authority, and the law contains a clause under which it ceases to apply automatically if an EU regulation on the same subject is adopted. That is a real attempt to supply the statutory safeguards the French law lacked.
But the structural objections remain. The Greek ban is still a blanket rule by age. It still reaches services regardless of their actual risk profile, and the reports available do not describe a parental-consent route or any individual maturity assessment. And it still requires, in the Council's words about France, that everyone prove their age, since a platform cannot exclude under-15s without checking users generally. A privacy-preserving wallet reduces the data leakage but does not remove the gate. Whether Greek courts, or the Court of Justice if a platform challenges the law as incompatible with EU rules, would treat these features as sufficient is untested.
The timetable is the real risk
Two and a half months is a short runway for a national age-assurance mandate. ID Tech Wire reports Greece is among seven member states working with the European Commission on an age-verification solution, which implies the tooling is still being built rather than standing ready. Compressed deadlines tend to produce two outcomes: platforms over-block and demand more identity data than necessary, or they comply cosmetically with weak checks that teenagers bypass. Neither protects children. Both normalise ID-gating of ordinary speech for adults, a cost that falls on every Greek user, not only on minors.
Why a patchwork is the wrong answer
The stronger long-term argument is against national experiments. The Commission's EU KIDS Act proposal of 17 September 2026 would limit autonomous account creation by children below 15 on specified platforms and systems, and its consultation runs until 3 December 2026. Greece's own sunset clause concedes that a single European rule is preferable. If Athens, Paris and others each build different thresholds, verification flows and penalties, the likely beneficiaries are the largest platforms, which can afford fourteen compliance regimes, while smaller and European services cannot.
A proportionate path
A better design would be risk-based rather than categorical. It would target specific features, such as algorithmic feeds, unsolicited contact from strangers and late-night notifications, rather than banning every service that allows communication. It would give parents a say, require on-device or wallet-based proofs that disclose only an age bracket, and mandate independent evaluation of whether the measure improves child wellbeing. Greece's wallet approach is the right instinct on privacy. The ban around it is the weaker part.
The practical test comes on 1 January 2027. If platforms ship verification that works without collecting identity documents, Greece will have supplied a useful template for Brussels. If they either block broadly or fail to comply, the law will join France's in a cautionary file on how speech-restricting measures should not be drafted.