The recommendation
Saudi Arabia's Shoura Council has formally called on the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST) to "develop age verification rules and usage restrictions for social media platforms" for users under 16. The council issued the call after reviewing CST's annual report for the 2025 fiscal year alongside observations from its Transport, Communications and Information Technology Committee, according to reporting confirmed by Gulf News and Khaleej Times, both dated July 3, 2026.
The Shoura Council does not write binding law on its own — it is an appointed consultative body that reviews government performance and forwards recommendations to the Council of Ministers. But its recommendations carry real weight: CST, the same regulator that oversees telecoms, spectrum and the space sector, is the body that would have to design and enforce whatever age-gating system follows. The recommendation lands weeks after CST published its Saudi Internet Report 2025, which found that 61.3% of Saudi internet users spend seven or more hours online daily and that AI-tool adoption among users has reached 45.2% — a usage profile regulators everywhere are treating as reason enough to intervene in how children spend that time.
The case for it
The strongest version of this argument is not paternalism for its own sake. Saudi Arabia has spent several years building out child-safety infrastructure — it helped launch the Child Protection in Cyberspace Index at the Global Cybersecurity Forum in Riyadh in October 2024, a joint project with the ITU, UNICEF and the DQ Institute, and has been praised for measurable gains in digital-citizenship education since 2020. Seven-plus hours of daily screen time among a population where a large share of users are teenagers is a legitimate policy concern, not a manufactured one. And Saudi Arabia is not moving first: it is following Australia, which became the world's first country to enforce a blanket under-16 social media ban on December 10, 2025, requiring platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube to remove or block minors' accounts or face fines up to roughly $50 million. If a G20 democracy with robust judicial review and a free press concluded that age-gating was worth trying, a Gulf monarchy citing the same evidence is not acting irrationally.
Where the analogy breaks
The problem is not the age threshold — 16 is the same number Australia picked — it's who is building the verification system and what else that system can be used for. Age verification requires some mechanism to bind an online account to a real identity, whether through ID upload, biometric estimation, or a government digital-ID layer. In Australia, that infrastructure sits under an independent eSafety Commissioner, subject to parliamentary oversight, a common-law free press, and NGOs like Amnesty International that can publicly call the policy an "ineffective quick fix" without consequence to themselves. Amnesty's substantive critique — that bans push risk underground rather than eliminating it, and that better data-protection law and platform design would serve minors more than prohibition — is worth taking seriously regardless of jurisdiction.
In Saudi Arabia, the same verification rails would sit inside CST, a regulator with no independent oversight body of the kind Australia's law assumes, operating in a media environment where the state already leans directly on platforms. Meta restricted more than 100 Facebook and Instagram pages from reaching Saudi and UAE audiences at government request between March and May 2026, including accounts belonging to ALQST for Human Rights and Saudi researcher Abdullah Alaoudh, according to a joint statement from ALQST and allied groups. Whatever CST builds to check a 15-year-old's age can, with a rule change rather than new legislation, become infrastructure for verifying the identity of anyone posting political speech — a capability regulators without independent checks rarely leave on the shelf.
What proportionate would look like
None of this means child-safety concerns are pretextual, or that CST shouldn't act. But proportionate regulation here means privacy-preserving age estimation rather than identity verification wherever technically possible, a published sunset or review clause tying the rules to measurable child-safety outcomes rather than indefinite authority, and an explicit bar — ideally written into the implementing regulation itself — against reusing the verification layer for any purpose beyond the stated one. The Shoura Council's recommendation is still just that: a recommendation, with CST yet to publish implementing rules. That gap is the window where these safeguards either get built in or get skipped.