Australia banned social networks for people under the age of 16 in December 2025. France “checked” TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram for under-15s in January 2026.
At the beginning of 2026, Slovak Minister of Informatization Samuel Migaľ also spoke about a similar ban.
And in April, Brussels also presented a proposal to ban the use of social media by people under the age of 16.
Experts warn that a seemingly useful idea will not work at all and will add a few more problems. This is also confirmed by the experience from the aforementioned Australia.
Verification application
The European Commission wants to prevent children from accessing inappropriate content by banning it.
In the future, only those who scan their identity card or other document through the verification application should be able to access social networks, and the latter will record the user’s real age based on this.
“Online platforms can confidently rely on our age verification app, so there are no more excuses,” said European Commission President Von der Leyen, assuring that the app meets the highest privacy standards in the world, works on any device and is easy to use.
Shot completely off
However, experts have been warning for a long time that it is enough for a child to borrow a cell phone from their parents or for an older sibling to register on the computer, and any verification application will be completely useless.
The absolutely most serious circumstance, that people are not able to distinguish between lies and intentional misrepresentation spread by social networks, is not solved by the ban at all.
“The biggest problem is that the state wants to ban, but has essentially resigned to education,” Ema Brunovská, a researcher at the Slovak Youth Council (RmS), summarized for Aktuality.sk.
A survey conducted in the fall of 2025 in cooperation with the Focus agency among people aged 15 to 30 showed that more than 75 percent of young people did not come across the warning that social networks contribute to the radicalization of society during classes.
Pupils and students thus learn quanta of information – from fractions, through sentence structure to the division of plant seeds – but the school system absolutely ignores what young people use on a daily basis and what will be crucial for their future – Internet content.
Stupid until now, even more stupid afterwards
According to experts, politicians will achieve only one thing by banning social networks for young people. The small part of children and youth who will not actually get access to social media after the tightening of the rules will be even less prepared for “hoaxes”, propaganda and manipulations than they are now.
“If we just isolate young people and then release them unprepared into the online world after the age of 16, they will not have the skills to verify information in depth. We can already see that their motivation to verify facts is often only superficial and they only need a basic overview,” warns Brunovská.
According to her, education should focus on the development of critical thinking. “Moving safely in the digital space does not mean banning networks, but teaching young people to recognize, for example, conspiracy theories or political extremism, which, according to the survey, they encounter most often,” she added.
Smer is a master in abusing people’s digital illiteracy:
Two aggravations
In addition, a blanket ban will add at least two problems.
The first is a further decline in the confidence of the young generation towards politicians. “What politicians present as protection is perceived by young people as a form of oppression, which only increases their distrust of the system,” the expert explained.
They are absolutely the least trusted source for young politicians when it comes to internet security. “Young people simply won’t accept an order from someone they don’t trust,” Brunovská named the bare truth.
The second problem is the very principle of the ban. It turns out that the same people who support state intervention are more likely to endorse other forms of forceful “solutions.” For example, physical violence against those whom some “authority” designates as an enemy.
Australian disappointment
All warnings are already being fulfilled in Australia, where a ban on social networks for children and young people is in place from December 2025, a poll suggests.
According to , only 26 percent admitted that as of December 2025, their access to social networks had been “impacted.”
It is not clearly written in the report whether these 26 percent did not find a way to circumvent the ban and lost access to social networks.
However, the authors of the research highlight the finding that young Australians from December 2025 know even less about what is happening in politics and society than before. Since some of them have stopped following social media, but at the same time they do not read or watch serious websites or TV channels at all, they have no way to get regular news.
This fully confirms the findings of RmS that without a radical change in education, the problem will only get worse. “If the educational system does not begin to urgently respond to this information vacuum, we will face a generation that considers undemocratic procedures to be a normal part of public life,” concluded Brunovská.
The Slovak Youth Council is trying to improve the situation, at least within the limits of its limited possibilities. As part of the Together for Healthy Media project, experts on youth work, policymakers and school representatives were connected on May 6 at the premises of Bratislava’s Umelka.
In the years 2024 to 2026, RmS implements the project in cooperation with the Czech Council for Children and Youth and with the support of the Erasmus+ program.
