Turkey's Parliament Passes Social Media Ban for Under-15s
April 24, 2026 - 11:43 am
Erdŏgan has 15 days to sign the bill into law. The legislation enters into force six months after publication in the Official Gazette. The main opposition CHP criticized it as a political censorship tool rather than a child protection measure.
Turkey has previously blocked Instagram, Roblox, and restricted platforms during the İmamoglu protests.
Turkey’s Grand National Assembly passed a law late on Wednesday banning social media for children under 15, making the country the latest—and one of the largest by population—to introduce legislative age restrictions on social media access.
Under the law, social media companies including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram will be required to 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.
The immediate political catalyst is the Kahramanön school shooting on 14 April 2026, in which a 14-year-old boy killed nine students and a teacher at a middle school in Kahramanön in southern Turkey before dying himself. Police subsequently arrested 162 people accused of sharing footage of the attack online. Investigators are examining the perpetrator’s online activity for clues to his motivation.
Erdŏgan made the political link explicit in a televised address on Monday: “We are living in a period where some digital sharing applications are corrupting our children’s minds, and social media platforms have, to put it bluntly, become cesspools.”
The parliamentary commission that proposed the law framed it in a report titled "Threats and Risks Awaiting Our Children in Digital Media."
The law’s operational mechanics carry significant compliance demands 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 notification in an emergency.
Foreign services with more than 100,000 daily users must maintain a local representative. Enforcement is through Turkey’s communications watchdog, the BTK. Penalties escalate from advertising bans to access speed restrictions, effectively throttling platform performance, to potential access bans. The speed restriction mechanism is the same tool Turkey has used in previous enforcement actions against platforms that have declined to comply with content removal orders.
Running parallel to the under-15 law is a second legislative initiative that is editorially more significant for digital rights. The Turkish government has separately reached an agreement with social media companies requiring that all Turkish citizens, not just minors, verify their identity to use social media accounts.