My child is a toddler, so I have not yet faced the phone negotiation that other parents describe with a mix of dread and fatigue. I am a father looking ahead, which is a useful vantage point but a limited one.
What I can do until then is report on how governments are beginning to answer it. This month, Greece’s parliament approved a law barring children under 15 from social media, effective in 2027. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced the plan in April in a video posted on TikTok, which he said he used so he could address teenagers directly.
Greece has chosen to restrict a particular kind of product. It’s seeking a restriction on the public, algorithm-driven feed, while leaving messaging alone. This is where I can look at the law there and begin to question how effective something like that might be here.
Ask anyone who lives in Israel, or who works in high-tech. Many Israeli lives run through groups, specifically WhatsApp, and those groups contain both the friendships a parent would want to protect, but also some of the material a parent most fears getting to the eye of their child.
A law aimed at accounts and feeds may not reach the second without disturbing the first. My view is that an age boundary should be judged by the childhood it impacts, not simply by the number of accounts it closes.
What Greece actually restricts
The rule bars access to online social networking services for anyone under 15. Parents cannot waive it, and accounts that already exist are not exempt. Age is counted by calendar year, so everyone born in the same year is treated as born on January 1.
Which services count is less settled than the headlines suggest. In October, the digital governance minister, Dimitris Papastergiou, named Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and described a possible extension to Snapchat. Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, and YouTube would not be affected.
Some reports add LinkedIn; others list X.
The bill itself contains no fixed list. It asks whether a service functions as a social network, and the government has said the list is dynamic.
A law that regulates services must decide whether to treat the whole product or only its social-networking features, and Greek coverage acknowledges that platforms combining these functions may need further clarification.
For example, platforms like Telegram and X both mix public, algorithmically shaped feeds with channels, groups, and private messages. Instagram has direct messages, and WhatsApp has channels that broadcast to large audiences. Until that clarification arrives, the permitted list is likely to remain fluid and merely a description of intent.
Why a shared boundary appeals to parents
The strongest argument for the law is about collective action. As I have come to understand by seeing my friends and family become parents to pre-teens, many of the pressures are put on families who feel obligated to operate on social media platforms.
A parent who says no to Instagram to a 12-year-old is not only making a decision about a product. She is making her child the exception in a class where everyone else has it. Individual rules are fragile when the social cost of following them falls on the child.
Then there are classroom WhatsApp groups, where teachers can broadcast to parents or students. Sometimes, kids themselves need to be on platforms to take part in transport rotas or social events.
A national boundary would change that. Greek officials framed it as a way to put pressure on platforms rather than a burden on children. Mitsotakis cited anxiety, sleep problems, and what he called ‘addictive design’. Parents who welcome this are not naive. They are asking for help against products engineered by large teams to hold a child’s attention, and they are saying that vigilance alone has not been enough.
