Turkey Bans Social Media Services for Children Under 15 Under New Regulation

Turkey has banned social networks from providing services to children under 15. The regulation was published in the Official Gazette, Bloomberg reports. There is a single threshold, 15 years, and the obligation rests on the platforms themselves: they must keep minors out, rather than families having to monitor them. The first report gives no effective date, no list of affected services and no size of penalties, so the details will have to be checked against the text of the document.

What is known so far

The facts fit into a few lines:

• Age threshold: 15 years.
• Who the rule targets: social platforms that provide services in Turkey.
• Form of the act: a regulation published in the Official Gazette.
• Not disclosed: the effective date, fines, the list of services, the age verification mechanism.

The last item is the most important. A ban without working verification remains a declaration. If the regulation requires companies to "not provide services," they will have to prove they comply, which means they need age verification.

Age verification comes down to technology

This is where AI comes in. A self-reported birth date has long been considered weak protection: a child types in any year, and the account is created. So platforms and regulators look at two classes of solutions. The first is age estimation from a face or video using computer vision models; Yoti and a number of other vendors offer such services. The second is behavioral models that use activity and content to flag users who may be younger than the age they stated. Meta, for example, already uses AI under Teen Accounts to identify teenagers who gave an adult age.

Both approaches have a cost: errors near the age boundary, biometric data collection and the risk of leaks. With a threshold of 15, an error of a year or two means some 14-year-olds will pass the check and some 16-year-olds will be blocked. A classifier struggles most in exactly this zone.

International context

Turkey is not the first. Since December 2025, Australia has closed social networks to users under 16. Denmark and France are discussing their own restrictions for children under 15. The logic is the same everywhere: responsibility shifts from parents to companies, and fines are tied to failure to meet the obligation, not to individual violations.

Turkey also has local specifics. Platforms there have long operated under tight regulation: companies are required to appoint local representatives, and access to services has been throttled more than once during periods of political tension. This means the state already has levers of pressure, and companies are unlikely to ignore the new regulation.

What teams and companies should do

For platforms' product and compliance teams, the first step is obvious: read the official text of the regulation and work out which services it counts as social networks. Messengers, video platforms and gaming communities may fall within the definition or outside it, and the scope of work depends on that.

The second step is to choose an age verification scheme before official requirements appear. It is worth comparing face-based estimation, verification through a mobile carrier or bank, and documents, with data protection in mind. The third step is to prepare a process for existing accounts: many users under 15 are already registered, and they will have to be identified and disabled.

Parents and schools, for now, only need to know this: in Turkey, platforms are required to close their services to children under 15, but how the rule works in practice will become clear only after deadlines and penalties are published. It is worth following clarifications from the regulator and the reaction of the large platforms.