On May 1, 2026, Turkey published Law No. 7578 in the Official Gazette (Issue 33240), an omnibus statute that — among unrelated provisions like extending maternity leave to 24 weeks — rewrites Internet Law No. 5651. The headline change is blunt: "Sosyal ağ sağlayıcı, on beş yaşını doldurmamış çocuklara hizmet sunamaz" — a social network provider may not serve children who have not completed age 15. Platforms have six months from publication, roughly until November 1, 2026, to comply.
What the law actually requires
The statute does four things. It bars under-15s from holding social media accounts. It requires providers to deploy age-verification measures to enforce that line and to offer differentiated, age-appropriate services to users 15 and older. It mandates parental-control tools that let parents manage account settings, require parental authorization for paid transactions, and monitor and limit screen time. And it requires platforms to publish and explain their safety measures to users.
Enforcement escalates in stages. According to a legal analysis of the amendments, regulator BTK can issue notifications, then fines of 1–10 million lira, then 10–30 million lira, then throttle a non-compliant provider's bandwidth by 30 percent, and finally by up to 50 percent. Foreign platforms above 100,000 daily Turkish users must appoint a local representative.
The case for acting is real
It would be dishonest to treat this as a regulator inventing a problem. Turkey's own statistics agency, TÜİK, found that 91.3 percent of children aged 6–15 used the internet in 2024, and 66.1 percent used social media — rising to 79 percent among 11–15-year-olds, with YouTube reaching 96.3 percent of child users (Türkiye Today, citing TÜİK). The political catalyst was visceral: a 14-year-old killed nine students and a teacher at a school in Kahramanmaraş on April 14, 2026, and investigators examined the attacker's exposure to online content promoting violence (Daily Sabah). A government watching two-thirds of its children inside engagement-optimized feeds, after a massacre, has a legitimate duty to respond.
And parts of this law are the right response. Mandating genuine parental controls over spending and screen time, requiring transparency about safety practices, and forcing age-rating on games are proportionate, design-level interventions. They give families tools and information without dictating outcomes. If Law No. 7578 had stopped there, it would be a model worth exporting.
Where it overreaches
The problem is the hard ban and the verification engine required to enforce it. You cannot keep every under-15 off a platform without checking the age of everyone — which is why these laws invariably become universal identity mandates. Turkey's apparent route is the e-Devlet state portal, meaning the practical price of an adult tweeting is authenticating against a government identity system. That collides directly with the right to anonymous speech. As the EFF argues, age-verification regimes "destroy our right to online anonymity — a cornerstone of our right to free expression," and the verification databases become "massive data 'honeypots' that invite identity theft" (EFF).
This matters more in Turkey than almost anywhere. The same Law No. 5651 being amended is the instrument Ankara has used for years to block sites and throttle bandwidth during unrest, including the 2025 İmamoğlu protests. The opposition CHP voted against the bill, arguing children should be protected "not with bans but with rights-based policies" (Turkish Minute). When the state that already controls the choke points also controls the identity gate to speech, "child safety" risks becoming the architecture for adult surveillance.
The evidence the ban will work is thin
The deeper objection is empirical: hard age bans do not reliably keep kids offline. Australia, the model most cited, found after rollout that a majority of young people could still access social media despite the prohibition (EFF). Teenagers borrow credentials, falsify ages, and reach for VPNs — tools that also strip away whatever safety features a compliant platform offers. A ban that pushes the most determined minors into unmonitored corners of the internet can leave them less safe, while imposing identity friction on every law-abiding adult. That is the inverse of proportionality.
A proportionate alternative exists
Turkey did not have to choose between doing nothing and building an ID gate. A proportionate version of this law keeps the parental-control mandate, the transparency duties, the spending and screen-time tools, and the game-rating system — all of which reduce harm without requiring mass verification — and drops the categorical under-15 prohibition in favor of strong default settings, algorithmic-design obligations, and enforceable safety-by-design duties, the approach favored in rights-based child-safety frameworks.
The six-month window is an opportunity. If BTK writes implementing rules that lean on privacy-preserving, on-device age estimation rather than centralized e-Devlet identity checks, and ring-fences verification data from the state, Turkey could salvage the law's genuinely useful core. If it does not, Turkey will have answered a real problem — too many children inside addictive feeds — with a tool that erodes anonymous speech for 85 million people and still won't keep the most at-risk kids out.