Turkey Passes Bill to Restrict Social Media for Under-15s

Turkish lawmakers approved a bill late Wednesday that would block children under 15 from accessing social media platforms, placing Turkey at the center of a fast-hardening fight over how far governments should go to police young people’s online lives.

The measure would force platforms to install age-verification systems, provide parental control tools and respond quickly to content deemed harmful. Recep Tayyip Erdogan now has 15 days to sign the bill for it to become law, giving Ankara a narrow window to turn the vote into binding national policy.

The timing sharpened the political weight of the move. The bill passed one week after the April 15 shooting at Ayser Çalık Middle School in the Onikişubat district of Kahramanmaraş Province, where a 14-year-old boy killed eight students and one teacher and wounded 13 others. Police are examining the suspect’s online activity as part of their motive investigation, making social media a central line of inquiry in a case that has shaken the country.

The crackdown does not stop at children. Turkish reporting says a separate draft law is being prepared that would require identity verification for all Turkish social media users, a sign that the debate in Ankara is moving toward broader digital identity controls. Turkish police have also ordered arrests over posts praising the school shootings, underscoring how quickly the state has moved against online speech it sees as a threat to public order.

Turkey’s bill fits into a wider international trend, but the details show how uneven that trend remains. Australia’s under-16 social media restrictions took effect in December 2025, and its eSafety Commissioner says age-restricted platforms must take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts. In Greece, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has proposed a uniform ban on social media use for children under 15 across the 27 European Union countries, along with standardized age-verification tools by 2027.

The European Union is also moving through an expert process on possible bloc-wide action, reflecting a growing consensus that age verification is no longer a niche technical issue but a regulatory test case. Yet the same tools that could keep children off platforms can also deepen privacy disputes, raise compliance costs and widen state leverage over speech. In Turkey, that tension now sits at the heart of a law written in the shadow of a massacre and a government determined to show it can act online as forcefully as it does offline.