Erdŏgan has 15 days to sign the bill into law. The legislation comes into force six months after its publication in the Official Gazette. The main opposition party, CHP, criticized it as a tool of political censorship rather than child protection.
Türkiye previously blocked Instagram, Roblox and restricted platforms during the İmamoglu protests.
Turkey’s Grand National Assembly passed a law late Wednesday prohibit social networks for children under 15 years of agemaking the country the latest, and one of the largest by population, to introduce legislative age restrictions on access to social media.
Under the law, social media companies, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, will be required to implement age verification systems, prevent minors under 15 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 come into force six months after its publication in the Official Gazette. Online gaming companies must also appoint a representative based in Türkiye to ensure compliance.
The immediate political catalyst is the Kahramanön school shooting on April 14, 2026, in which a 14-year-old boy killed nine students and a teacher at a high school in Kahramanön, southern Turkey, before dying himself. Police later arrested 162 people accused of sharing images of the attack online. Investigators are examining the perpetrator’s online activity for clues about his motivation.
Erdŏgan made the political link explicit in a televised speech on Monday: ““We live in a period where some digital sharing apps are corrupting the minds of our children and social media platforms, to put it bluntly, have become cesspools.”
The parliamentary committee that proposed the law formulated it in a report titled “Threats and risks that await our children in digital media.”
The operational mechanics of the law 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 case of emergency.
Foreign services with more than 100,000 daily users must maintain a local representative. Enforcement of the law is carried out through Turkey’s communications watchdog, the BTK.
Penalties range from advertising bans to access speed restrictions, effectively limiting platform performance, to potential access bans. The speed restriction mechanism is the same tool that Türkiye has used in previous enforcement actions against platforms that refused to comply with content removal orders.
Parallel to the law on minors under 15 years of age, there 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 that requires all Turkish citizens, not just minors, to verify their identity to use social media accounts.
The precise mechanism of this identity verification system has not been revealed and it is still unknown how the platforms will technically implement it. Merve Gürlek, the Turkish official who announced the deal, made the announcement on April 3; More details on the legal framework are still being drafted.
The end of social media anonymity for all Turkish users represents a categorically different type of intervention than the age restriction for those under 15 years of age and carries obvious implications for political discourse.
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 prohibitions but with rights-based policies.”
This is a standard liberal criticism of age-based social media bans, but in the Turkish context it carries additional weight given the government’s documented history of using platform restrictions for political purposes.
Online communications were widely restricted during the 2025 protests in support of jailed opposition Istanbul 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 one official described as the “Promotion of homosexuality.”
The law passed by parliament is not in itself a tool of censorship; but it expands and formalizes the regulatory infrastructure through which the government controls what Turks can access online.
Türkiye’s law adds to a rapidly expanding international landscape of age restrictions on social media. Australia’s ban on under-16s came into effect in December 2025.
Norway announced on Friday which plans to legislate a ban for minors under 16 by the end of 2026. Indonesia has implemented restrictions on minors under 16’s access to platforms that expose minors to pornography, cyberbullying and addiction. France has age verification requirements for social media.
He UK Online Safety Law imposes damage prevention obligations on platforms. Turkey’s approach is distinctive in two ways: it combines the child protection measure with a universal identity verification requirement that no comparable democracy has yet implemented, and it introduces it into a political environment where the infrastructure for platform restrictions 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 largely depend on how the BTK applies its enforcement powers in the coming years.
