Spain is planning to ban social media access for children under 16, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Tuesday, in a move to protect young people from the harm of online content.
Spain joins a growing number of countries, including Australia and France, that have adopted or are considering measures to restrict minors’ access to social media. (Bloomberg)Sanchez slammed the world’s biggest tech companies in a speech at the Dubai summit, saying they allow illegal content such as child sexual abuse and non-consensual sexualized deepfake images to proliferate on their platforms. He said governments also needed to “turn a blind eye”.
“Today, our children are exposed to a space they’ve never had to navigate alone,” Sanchez said. “We will not accept this anymore.”
Spain joins a growing number of countries, including Australia and France, that have adopted or are considering measures to restrict minors’ access to social media.
In January, France approved a bill banning social media for children under 15, paving the way for it to come into force at the start of the next school year in September. The bill would ban the use of mobile phones in high schools.
Australia has begun enforcing the world’s first social media ban for under-16s, after its government passed a measure it blamed for failing to prevent children from having accounts on platforms including TikTok, Twitch, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram.
Denmark has introduced similar legislation to ban social media access for users under 15, while the UK said last month it would consider banning young teenagers from social media, as it tightens laws designed to protect children from harmful content and excessive screen time.
Sanchez said Spain’s social media companies will have to enforce the ban with age verification systems, “not just check boxes, but real barriers that work.”
Many social media apps require users to be at least 13 years old, although enforcement varies. Users are often asked to declare their own age.
Spain’s ban will be added to an already existing measure focused on digital protection for minors being debated in parliament, a government spokesman said. Sanchez said that could happen as early as next week.
It is unclear whether Sanchez’s left-wing coalition will get the necessary approval in parliament, where his government lacks a majority. A spokesman for the far-right Vox party said the Sanchez government’s move was aimed at “making sure no one criticizes them,” while the main opposition party – the center-right Popular Party – said it had proposed similar restrictions last year, apparently offering its support.
Social media companies Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
But Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and the world’s richest man, wrote “Sanchez is the real fascist totalitarian” in a post referring to the Spanish leader’s speech at the World Government Summit in the United Arab Emirates.
In his speech, Sánchez also said Spain had joined five other European countries in what the Spanish leader called a “coalition of the digitally willing” to coordinate regulation of social media platforms at a multinational level.
Additionally, Spain will make it a criminal offense to manipulate algorithms to promote illegal content and hold tech executives responsible for failing to remove criminal content from their platforms, he said.
“Technology should no longer be pretended to be neutral,” Sanchez said.
Both measures would require parliamentary approval to change Spanish law, a government spokesman said.
