The United Arab Emirates has introduced a minimum age of 15 for social media access, with a 12-month transition period for platforms to comply, while the European Commission prepares to propose EU-wide age restrictions in September. The UAE decision, announced by the Child Digital Safety Council, establishes a graduated set of safeguards tailored to different developmental stages, requiring platforms to meet defined regulatory and technical standards. According to European Commission sources cited by Euractiv, President Ursula von der Leyen will use her annual State of the Union address on 16 September to outline plans for a common age limit, though the precise threshold and enforcement mechanisms remain undecided. These moves follow Australia’s landmark December 2025 ban on under-16s, which has since been emulated or considered by governments in the United Kingdom, Canada, Turkey, France, Spain, Germany, and Indonesia, among others.

Viewed from Brussels, the push for a harmonised EU framework reflects concern that divergent national laws are fragmenting the single market. Several member states, including France and Spain, are already advancing their own restrictions, while the European Parliament has called for a bloc-wide minimum age of 16. The expert group on child protection online is expected to deliver recommendations on 13 July, which will inform the Commission’s legislative proposal. In parallel, Saudi Arabia’s Shoura Council has urged the communications regulator to develop age verification rules for under-16s, and Argentina’s lower house is debating multiple bills that range from an outright ban for under-14s to a model requiring parental consent for 13- to 16-year-olds.

Governments in Asia have adopted distinct approaches. Indonesia’s PP TUNAS regulation, effective since March 2026, obliges electronic system providers to offer child-friendly services rather than imposing a blanket ban; the communications ministry reports that Meta closed 185,000 underage accounts in two months to comply. China, by contrast, caps screen time for minors, a measure that officials in Beijing describe as directly targeting platform design features that foster dependency. The global debate, as viewed from New Delhi, remains unsettled, with Indian state-level discussions weighing the empirical evidence on harm against the practical difficulties of enforcement.

Implementation challenges are a common thread. Age verification systems, required by almost all proposed frameworks, raise data privacy concerns and, as the Australian experience shows, are routinely circumvented by teenagers using family credentials or technological workarounds. Officials in Canberra acknowledge that many under-16s continue to access platforms after the ban, and some have migrated to less regulated services. The UAE’s graduated model and YouTube’s new supervised accounts in the Middle East represent attempts to balance protection with access, but the fragmentation of global standards leaves platforms navigating a patchwork of obligations. The European Commission’s September announcement is expected to clarify the direction of travel for the bloc, while legislative processes in Canada and Argentina are set to advance in the second half of the year.