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 criticised it as a political censorship tool rather than child protection.
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.
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President Recep Tayyip Erdŏgan has 15 days to sign the bill. If signed, it will enter into force six months after publication in the Official Gazette. Online gaming companies must also appoint a Turkey-based representative to ensure compliance.
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.
The precise mechanism of this identity verification system has not been disclosed, and how platforms will technically implement it is still unknown. Merve Gürlek, the Turkish official who announced the agreement, made the announcement on 3 April; further details of the legal framework are still being drafted.
The end of social media anonymity for all Turkish users represents a categorically different kind of intervention than the under-15 age restriction and carries obvious implications for political speech.
The opposition Republican People’s Party, the CHP, Turkey’s main secular opposition, voted against the bill, arguing that children should be protected “not with bans but with rights-based policies.”
This is a standard liberal critique of age-based social media bans, but in the Turkish context it carries additional weight given the government’s documented record of using platform restrictions for political purposes.
Online communications were widely restricted during 2025 protests in support of Istanbul’s jailed opposition mayor Ekrem İmamoglu. Instagram was blocked in 2024 following a dispute over Hamas-related content.
Roblox was banned, with Turkish officials citing inappropriate sexual content and, separately, what an official described as the “promotion of homosexuality.”
The law passed by parliament is not in itself a tool of censorship; but it expands and formalises the regulatory infrastructure through which the government controls what Turks can access online.
Turkey’s law joins a rapidly expanding international landscape of social media age restrictions. Australia’s ban for under-16s came into force in December 2025.
Norway announced on Friday that it plans to legislate a ban for under-16s by end of 2026. Indonesia has implemented restrictions on under-16 access to platforms exposing minors to pornography, cyberbullying, and addiction. France has age verification requirements for social media.
The UK’s Online Safety Act imposes harm prevention duties on platforms. Turkey’s approach is distinctive in two ways: it pairs the child protection measure with a universal identity verification requirement that no comparable democracy has yet implemented, and it introduces it in a political environment where the infrastructure for platform restriction has already been deployed against political opposition.
Whether the legislation functions primarily as child protection or primarily as a new layer of state control over digital speech will depend largely on how the BTK applies its enforcement powers in the years ahead.
