Slovak Government Approves Under-16 Social Media Ban

Slovakia’s government approved a bill on Wednesday that would stop under-16s from creating social media accounts and require platforms to verify the ages of the people signing up. It still needs to pass parliament.

The verification requirement is written to keep personal data away from the platforms. Under the proposal, a service would receive confirmation that a person meets the age threshold and nothing further, with the rules following the European Union’s existing digital services framework.

Government documents accompanying the bill cite children’s vulnerability to algorithm-driven content, social pressure, manipulative practices, addictive behaviour, disinformation and radicalisation narratives. The government said it set the threshold at 16 on the basis of psychology and neuroscience findings and international research into adolescent development.

The measure was unveiled in June by the coalition party Hlas, covering Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Snapchat while exempting messaging and email services. Education Minister Tomas Drucker said then that the legislation could take effect from January 2027, and that 16 to 18 year olds would get an automatic protected mode with private profiles by default, location sharing disabled and restrictions on being added to groups.

Drucker also said the checks could run on digital identity tools already being built through Slovakia’s e-documents infrastructure and the EU digital wallet framework, which would put a state credential between a teenager and a social media sign-up.

That is the part practitioners have questioned. Ladislav Kovar, an e-government expert at Slovensko.Digital, said passing the law will be considerably easier than making it work, pointing to VPNs, foreign accounts and profiles registered under someone else’s identity. Any system that relied on strong state authentication or a state-guaranteed digital identity would be “particularly sensitive,” he said.

Slovakia is entering a crowded field. Bulgaria’s GERB has proposed under-16 limits enforced through a digital age-check wallet, and an EU child safety panel in July rejected biometric age estimation in favour of zero-knowledge proofs. France went furthest and was stopped, with its Constitutional Council striking down an under-15 ban this month partly because it would have required every user to prove their age.

Sources: News.az citing Reuters, The Slovak Spectator

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team