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06-02-2026
MADRID: Spain has become the latest European country to make plans to ban social media for children under the age of 16.
“We will protect them from the digital Wild West,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday.
The ban, which still needs parliamentary approval, is part of a raft of changes that include making company executives responsible for “illegal or harmful content” on their platforms.
Australia became the world’s first country to bring in a ban last year, with others watching and judging its success.
France, Denmark and Austria have also announced that they are considering their own national age limits.
The UK government has launched a consultation on whether to implement a ban for under-16s. Social media companies have argued that the bans would be ineffective, difficult to implement and could isolate vulnerable teenagers. Reddit is challenging Australia’s ban in the High Court.
“Today, our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone,” Sanchez said, describing social media as a place of “addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation (and) violence.
“We will no longer accept that. We will protect them.”
Sanchez first mooted a possible ban in November, but on Tuesday, the plan was fleshed out.
Under the changes, social media platforms would be required to have effective age verification systems, “not just check boxes, but real barriers that work,” the prime minister explained, in a possible reference to the loopholes Australian children use to bypass checks including simply using a photo of an adult.
The new laws would also criminalize manipulating algorithms to amplify illegal content. “This is something created, promoted and disseminated by certain actors whom we will investigate, as well as the platforms whose algorithms amplify disinformation in exchange for profit,” Sanchez said.
“Hiding behind code and claiming that technology is neutral is no longer acceptable.”
There would also be a new system designed to track “how digital platforms fuel division and amplify hate”. No further details were given on how this would work.
Another measure, Sanchez said, would be to “investigate and prosecute the crimes committed by Grok (X’s AI tool), TikTok, and Instagram”.
The European Commission has launched an investigation into Grok over concerns it was used to create sexualized images of real people.
The UK has announced its own investigation into Grok and on Tuesday in France, the offices of X were raided by the Paris prosecutor’s cyber-crime unit as it looked into allegations of offences including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography.
X is yet to respond to either investigation, media has approached it for comment. It has previously characterized the French investigation as an attack on free speech.
Earlier, The European Commission has launched a new formal investigation against X under the Digital Services Act (DSA). In parallel, the Commission extended its ongoing investigation launched in December 2023 into X’s compliance with its recommender systems risk management obligations.
The new investigation will assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with the deployment of Grok’s functionalities into X in the EU. This includes risks related to the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, such as manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
