Turkey this week passed legislation barring children under 15 from social media, joining a small but growing number of nations seeking to protect underage users from the potential harms of the online world.
The legislation, which the Turkish Parliament passed on Wednesday, requires social media companies to ensure they do not provide services to underage users and to offer parental controls for online transactions. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to sign it into law.
Advocates for the law, including Mr. Erdogan and his governing Justice and Development Party, have said the measure aims to protect children from dangers like social media addiction, cyberbullying and exposure to violence, pornography and commercial exploitation.
“We are living in a period where some digital-sharing applications have violated our children’s minds and social media platforms have, to put it bluntly, become cesspools,” Mr. Erdogan said this week, before the vote.
The measure, which will be carried out gradually, does not specify which platforms will be affected or detail how users’ ages will be verified. But Turkish officials have said the login process will require the use of an online portal run by the government.
The additional step has raised concerns among free-speech advocates that the new procedures will threaten online privacy and freedom of expression.
“Under the guise of protecting children, they are introducing a much more sinister system,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul Bilgi University and co-founder of IFOD, a free-speech association.
Concern has risen in recent years among parents and governments about the effects of social media on children, including, advocates for greater restrictions say, declining attention spans, damaged self-esteem and vulnerability to online abuse.
In December, Australia unveiled the world’s first nationwide ban on social media for anyone younger than 16. Indonesia followed in March, and Malaysia is pursing a similar regulation. The French Parliament is moving ahead on legislation to bar children younger than 15 from social media. President Emmanuel Macron of France has voiced his support for the bill and wants it to be in effect by the start of the academic year this fall.
Turkey’s legislation has been in the works for a while, but it took on added urgency after two school shootings in two days this month left nine people dead and 29 others wounded, officials said. Investigators examined the assailants’ social media accounts for indications of their motives.
The Turkish government’s history of restricting or blocking internet sites has led critics to question whether the new law would be used to do more than protect children.
Turkey has repeatedly blocked access to YouTube and has at times effectively shut down Instagram and X during protests or after terrorist attacks.
It rendered Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, inaccessible for two and a half years after the site refused to remove descriptions of Turkey’s relationship with Syrian militants that the government objected to. Access to Wikipedia was restored in 2020, after the country’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the site.
Much of the concern about the new legislation comes from the government’s proposed role in how people will log in to social media sites.
In a televised interview this week before the measure passed in Parliament, Akin Gurlek, Turkey’s justice minister, spoke out against anonymous social media accounts, saying they could be used to commit crimes or carry out “character assassinations.”
The solution, he said, was a separate law being drafted to require all users to log in to an online portal run by the government in order to have access to social media platforms. Then, if accounts are suspected of links to crimes, the government could obtain the account owners’ information from social media companies.
Mr. Gurlek said this process would also be used to verify users’ ages.
“We are bringing accountability to social media,” he said. “Freedom is everywhere, but even freedom has limits.”
Mr. Akdeniz, the law professor, called government involvement in how users log in to social media sites “a problematic approach” that would have a “chilling effect” on how people interact online.
Anonymous accounts, he said, give people more freedom to discuss topics like politics and sports without opening themselves up to personal attacks, jeopardizing their employment or risking reprisals from the government.
The Turkish government has a history of prosecuting people for social media posts, and private companies have dismissed employees who have been detained for online comments.
The new restrictions could scare users away from social media, Mr. Akdeniz said.
“People will abandon their anonymous accounts because they will not just be concerned about being prosecuted, but also losing their jobs,” he said.
Ben Hubbard is the Istanbul bureau chief for The Times, covering Turkey and the surrounding region.
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