Turkey's parliament approves a ban on social media for those under 15 years old.

      Erdŏgan has a period of 15 days to sign the legislation into law. The law will take effect six months following its publication in the Official Gazette. The main opposition party, CHP, has criticized the bill as a tool for political censorship rather than a measure for child protection.

      Turkey has previously blocked platforms like Instagram and Roblox and imposed restrictions during the protests related to İmamoglu. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey approved a law late Wednesday that prohibits social media access for children under 15, marking the country as one of the largest by population to establish legal age limits for social media usage.

      Under this new law, social media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram will be required to implement age verification processes, prevent users under 15 from registering accounts, and provide parental control tools for managing the accounts of users aged 15 to 17.

      President Recep Tayyip Erdŏgan has a 15-day timeframe to sign the bill, which will come into effect six months after being published. Online gaming companies are also mandated to appoint a local representative in Turkey for compliance purposes.

      The bill's immediate political trigger was the school shooting in Kahramanön on April 14, 2026, where a 14-year-old boy fatally shot nine students and a teacher before taking his own life. Following this, the police arrested 162 individuals for allegedly sharing videos of the incident online. Investigators are looking into the shooter’s online activities for potential motives.

      In a televised address on Monday, Erdŏgan explicitly connected the legislation to this incident, stating, “We are living in a time when some digital sharing applications are corrupting our children’s minds, and social media platforms have, frankly speaking, become cesspools.”

      The parliamentary commission that suggested the law released a report titled “Threats and Risks Awaiting Our Children in Digital Media.” The implementation of the law demands significant compliance from platforms; companies with over 10 million daily users in Turkey must remove identified harmful content within one hour during emergencies.

      Foreign services with more than 100,000 daily users are required to retain a local representative. Enforcement is handled by Turkey’s communications authority, BTK. Penalties range from advertising bans and access speed limitations, which can hinder platform performance, to potential access bans. The speed restriction measure is the same one used in past enforcement actions against non-compliant platforms.

      Alongside the under-15 law, there is a second legislative effort that holds greater significance for digital rights. The Turkish government has made a separate agreement with social media companies that mandates all Turkish citizens to verify their identities to access social media accounts, not just minors.

      Details of the identity verification mechanism have not yet been revealed, and the method of technical implementation on platforms remains unclear. Merve Gürlek, the Turkish official who announced this agreement on April 3, stated that more details concerning the legal framework are still under development. The end of social media anonymity for all Turkish users represents a distinctly different level of intervention compared to the under-15 age restriction and has clear implications for political discourse.

      The CHP, Turkey’s primary secular opposition party, opposed the bill, arguing that child protection should be achieved “not through bans but through rights-based policies.” This critique aligns with typical liberal views on age-based bans, but it carries additional significance in Turkey due to the government’s history of leveraging platform restrictions for political ends.

      During the protests in 2025 supporting Istanbul’s jailed opposition mayor, Ekrem İmamoglu, online communication faced extensive restrictions. Instagram was blocked in 2024 following conflicts over Hamas-related content, and Roblox was banned, with officials citing inappropriate sexual content and, separately, the “promotion of homosexuality.”

      While the legislation passed by parliament is not inherently a censorship tool, it broadens and formalizes the regulatory framework through which the government manages online access for its citizens. Turkey's law falls in line with the growing international trend of social media age restrictions, as evidenced by Australia’s ban for under-16s that took effect in December 2025, and Norway’s recent announcement of similar legislation planned by the end of 2026.

      Indonesia has enacted restrictions on under-16 access to prevent exposure to pornography, cyberbullying, and addiction, while France requires age verification for social media. The UK’s Online Safety Act imposes duties on platforms to prevent harm.

      Turkey's approach is unique in two aspects: it couples the child protection initiative with a universal identity verification requirement—a step not yet taken by comparable democracies—and it does so within a political context where the infrastructure for platform restriction has already been utilized against opposition voices.

      The effectiveness of the legislation as a method for child protection or as a new layer of governmental control over digital discourse will largely depend on how the BTK exercises its enforcement authority in the coming years.