The UAE has imposed the Arab world’s clearest social-media age restriction. The harder question for governments and technology companies is how to enforce it without creating a disproportionate new identity infrastructure.
The UAE has drawn the region’s clearest legal line yet on children and social media.
Under Cabinet Resolution No. 106 of 2026, children under 15 are prohibited from creating or operating personal social-media accounts. Parental consent cannot override the restriction. The rules also prevent under-15s from accessing core interactive functions on covered platforms, including posting, commenting, sharing and participating in public groups or other large-scale interactive spaces.
The resolution took effect on June 30, while platforms have 12 months to bring their systems into compliance. The prohibition is therefore legally established, while its full technical implementation is being phased in.
For global platforms, that turns child safety into a new compliance obligation. Age assurance, account controls and data governance increasingly become costs of operating in the market.
That may prove more consequential than the headline age limit itself.
Age assurance becomes the real test
Self-declared dates of birth will no longer be enough. The UAE framework envisages stronger age-assurance mechanisms and places obligations on platforms to identify underage users, restrict inappropriate functionality and establish safeguards around children’s access.
Age assurance can determine not only who may open an account, but who sees particular content, who can contact whom and which platform features become available.
That makes the infrastructure used to establish age almost as important as the age threshold.
For platforms, the compliance equation is difficult: they must become substantially better at distinguishing children from adults without collecting more personal information than necessary.
The commercial implications extend beyond social-media companies. As governments demand stronger proof of age, they create potential demand for digital-identity systems, specialist age-assurance providers and privacy-enhancing technologies.
But the larger commercial risk is fragmentation. If governments converge around interoperable, privacy-preserving standards, age assurance could become another manageable layer of platform compliance. If they impose different thresholds, identity requirements and data-retention rules, global services could face an increasingly fragmented regulatory architecture.
A regional regulatory experiment
The UAE has moved further than its neighbours, but it is unlikely to remain alone.
Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council has called for the Communications, Space and Technology Commission to develop age-assurance rules and appropriate restrictions for social-media users under 16. It is an important policy signal, but not yet an enacted Saudi prohibition.
Egypt is taking a broader route. The government has been developing legislation governing children’s use of social-media applications and electronic games, while officials have also discussed child-focused telecommunications arrangements incorporating parental controls and age-based restrictions.
That approach could ultimately reach beyond individual platforms and into telecommunications infrastructure itself.
Bahrain provides a useful counterpoint. A proposal to prevent under-15s from creating social-media accounts has encountered government objections over enforceability and the privacy implications of age verification.
The regional picture is therefore not one of regulatory uniformity. Governments increasingly accept that children’s online exposure warrants stronger intervention; they remain much less settled on how restrictive that intervention should be and how much personal information users should surrender to make it enforceable.
Australia tests whether bans can work
International experience offers competing models rather than a settled consensus.
Australia provides the most advanced test of an account-based restriction. Since December 10, 2025, covered social-media platforms have been required to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or retaining accounts. The obligation falls on platforms, not children or their parents.
Early results underline the difficulty of converting a statutory age into an effective digital barrier.
Meta said it removed more than 756,000 accounts suspected of belonging to Australian under-16s from Facebook and Instagram between December and June. YouTube and TikTok have also reported removing large numbers of underage accounts. Yet preliminary evidence presented to regulators indicated that about 80 per cent of minors surveyed were still using covered platforms. Technology companies have cautioned that it is too early to draw firm conclusions from the data.
The evidence remains preliminary, but Australia is already illustrating the technical difficulty of translating a statutory age threshold into a durable digital barrier.
Britain moves towards a harder line
The UK has so far operated a more risk-based regime under the Online Safety Act, requiring services to assess risks to children and deploy highly effective age assurance in specified circumstances.
That distinction is narrowing.
In June, the UK government announced plans to require specific social-media services to use highly effective age assurance to prevent under-16s from accessing them. Ofcom is examining how such checks could operate, with regulations expected to be put before parliament by the end of 2026 and protections potentially taking effect in 2027.
The international distinction is therefore becoming less binary. Governments are experimenting with account restrictions, content controls and risk-based duties, but each eventually encounters the same question: how reliably can an online service establish a user’s age?
France exposes the constitutional risk
France has demonstrated what can happen when the architecture supporting an age restriction is not sufficiently defined.
On August 14, France’s Constitutional Council blocked legislation that would have prohibited children under 15 from accessing social media.
The court concluded that the measure disproportionately interfered with freedom of expression and communication and lacked sufficient safeguards for privacy. The legislation required age verification without adequately specifying the conditions and limits governing that process.
The ruling does not settle the international argument over minimum ages.
It sharpens it.
A government can decide that children should be kept off particular platforms. But enforcing that decision may require verifying the age of everybody attempting to enter — including adults.
A child-protection measure can therefore become, if poorly designed, a population-wide identity check.
Europe tries to separate age from identity
The European Union is developing another model: proving age while revealing as little identity information as possible.
The European Commission has developed a harmonised, privacy-preserving age-verification architecture intended to allow users to demonstrate that they satisfy an age threshold without unnecessarily disclosing their identity to the online service.
The principle is straightforward:
Prove the attribute, not the identity.
Under the Commission’s blueprint, proof can initially be generated using sources such as national electronic IDs, passports or identity cards. Once proof is issued, the link between the user and the proof provider is cut. The online service subsequently receives anonymous proof that the threshold has been met rather than information capable of identifying the user.
The Commission is encouraging EU member states to make robust, privacy-preserving age-verification tools available by the end of 2026, with an architecture designed to be compatible with future European Digital Identity Wallets.
If such credentials become interoperable, platforms could potentially satisfy regulatory requirements without building separate identity databases for every service or jurisdiction. For MENA governments, the choice is consequential: each platform can independently identify its users, or age can be established through reusable, privacy-preserving infrastructure.
The test moves from legislation to infrastructure
The UAE has moved first in the Arab world with a binding national framework. Elsewhere in MENA, governments are exploring different combinations of platform restrictions, age assurance, parental controls and telecommunications safeguards.
International experience suggests that legislation is only the beginning. Australia illustrates the difficulty of enforcement, while France demonstrates the legal limits governments can encounter when age-verification safeguards are insufficiently defined. Europe is attempting to resolve part of that tension through privacy-preserving credentials.
Success should therefore not be measured simply by how many underage accounts disappear. Governments must also ask how much personal information is collected to achieve that result, who holds it, how securely it is protected and whether a less intrusive architecture could produce the same outcome.
Protecting children online will be difficult to call a victory if doing so requires identifying everyone else.
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