Under 16 social media bans are intensifying across Europe.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis is the latest leader to praise a ban, saying experts he spoke to said social media is “very harmful to children.”

The Czech government is seriously considering the ban this year, according to Deputy Prime Minister Karel Havlicek, who gave comments to CNN Prima News, a Czech TV news channel.

Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the country’s plans to ban under-16 users from social media, calling it a step to protect children.from the digital wild west“in a speech in Dubai. In his speech, Sánchez also said that Spain has joined a new alliance with five other European countries that he called the “coalition of the digitally willing.” Although the identity of the five other countries is uncertain, there are certainly more than five European countries that have signed the willingness to limit the use of social media by children and teenagers.

This week too, both Greece and Turkey announced that they are approaching a ban.

Last week, the lower house of the French parliament voted PRO of a ban targeting under 15 and the bill now heads to the French Senate.

German digital minister Karsten Wildberger said he sees “a lot of merit” in a social media ban and considers the age restriction “more than reasonable.” Austrian government officials SAYS that they are considering the ban for under-14s to be effective before the start of the next school year, while the Irish The media minister said he plans to introduce online child safety measures such as banning under-16s “incrementally.”

It’s supposed to be Poland draft a law banning under-15s from social media, Portugal debating a proposed ban that would include access with parental consent, the United Kingdom’s House of Lords has backed a ban on social media for under-16s in a VOTE last month, Norway worked a similar hard limit and Denmark announced plans for a ban earlier noVeMber.

The European Union is the same EVALUATION a ban that affects all 27 European countries that are part of the bloc. the Dutch the government has reportedly shown support.

What sparked this current global regulatory wave was a historic ban on social media australian target under-16s. Starting in mid-December, many children and teenagers in Australia were banned from social media platforms TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Kick and Twitch.

A jumping off point for the ban in Australia is American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Concerned Generation,” which argues that the overwhelming presence of social media at critical stages of adolescent development fundamentally changes the brains of those born after 1995.

Social media addiction in children and adolescents is linked to higher feelings of Loneliness, depressionanxiety, attention deficit, body image issues and poor sleep quality. Many regulators are also increasingly concerned about unchecked cyberbullying.

the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report last month that linked long-term use of digital media to language delays, anger issues, weaker cognition and even an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, and called on tech companies and the government to put strict guardrails in place banning harmful social media design features such as user profiles, autoplay and algorithmic recommender systems.

Major American tech companies, which have great influence in the digital world as owners of some of the leading social media platforms that face the fallout of these restrictions, are not happy with this trend. Metawhich runs teenagers’ favorite social media platform Instagramhas repeatedly asked Australian regulators to reconsider the ban. (On a related note, Meta recently shared plans to make his social media feeds more addictive with LLM-developed recommendation systems. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “soon” there will be “an AI that understands you” and tailors your feed accordingly.)

After Sánchez’s speech, in which he also shared the intentions to hold tech companies legally accountable for hateful and illegal content on their platforms and for algorithm manipulation, Elon Musk took X to call the Spanish prime minister a “true fascist totalitarian,” and “a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain.”

As countries around the world begin to introduce restrictions that hurt American technology companies, it will be interesting to see how the Trump administration reacts. Trump has repeatedly made American big tech interests the centerpiece of his foreign trade policy, especially regarding Europe. Trump considers European regulation of digital platforms and tech companies “foreign blackmail” against the United States, and while some of his trade decisions may have led to looser regulation in some instances, it also pushed some European governments far away from American tech.