reuters.com
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Greece will ban access to social media for children under the age of 15 from January 1, 2027, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Wednesday, citing rising anxiety, sleep problems and the addictive design of online platforms.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260408092853/https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/greece-ban-social-media-under-15s-2027-pm-says-2026-04-08/

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  • ddplf@szmer.infoEnglish
    43·
    10 days ago

    This is very good actually. This cannot be done on an individual level without alienating your children from their folk, who will still be using social media. And you obviously can’t expect greedy corporations to just stop destroying the civilization for profit.

    • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
      4·
      9 days ago

      It’s not good, because the method of enforcement is trusting tech companies to ethically use and store PII.

      This is an attack on privacy masquerading as “Think of the children!”

      • undefinedTruth@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        This one actually works a bit differently. Parents will need to install an app called Kids Wallet which will provide some kind of an API to the digital services to verify their age without revealing any other credentials to the platform. And the birth data will come directly from the Greek civil registry.

        According to Euractiv, the wallet app will use the Greek digital ID of a parent or guardian, validated by TaxisNet, the country’s national authorization service. In this way, parents can use their digital ID app to request age assurance to validate the child’s identity using date of birth data from the Greek civil registry. The government says third-party applications could retrieve the child’s age via API with parental consent.

        https://www.biometricupdate.com/202503/greeces-kids-wallet-for-age-assurance-gets-parental-consent-to-access-civil-registry

        I am not an advocate for age verification laws. Quite the contrary as I believe they create a slippery slope, as at the end of the day someone has to decide that is considered “inappropriate” for children and the definition of that keeps shifting based on how is on power.

        Still though, it is a lot less worse than what many US states are doing, where everyone is supposed to upload a government ID and go through KYC.