TR Social Network Child Services and Age Verification Regulation

Why It Matters

Sets an under-15 social media prohibition with verification through a state-issued age token and a detailed list of features barred for 15-17-year-olds, including sequential visual feeds and personalised advertising.

Who Must Comply

Safety Provisions

• Social network providers may not provide services to children who have not turned 15 (Article 5(1)); account requests from users found to be under 15 are refused (Article 6(4)(a))
• Age verification at account creation with an age token generated through the e-Devlet Gateway, which states only whether the user is 15 or over and 18 or over and carries no other personal data (Articles 6(2) and 7); visitors not resident in Turkey may obtain a passport-based exceptional token
• Providers must run their own single or layered age-verification methods for the life of the service and suspend an account where there is reasonable suspicion it is used outside its verified age band (Article 6(3))
• Age-verification methods and parental controls must be robust against false declarations and manipulation, explainable and auditable, and designed not to produce systematic discrimination (Article 5(4)-(6))
• Segregated service for 15-17-year-olds: no services that may create addiction; private accounts by default with no public option; follower lists hidden; messages only from followed accounts and no read receipts; no contact-list synchronisation or friend suggestions from third-party contact data; screenshot blocking; no live streaming; no interface that presents visual content sequentially by scrolling, tapping or autoplay; no behavioural customisation, profiling or personalised commercial advertising (Article 8(5))
• Content filtering and recommender-system settings that reduce 15-17-year-olds' exposure to content harmful to their development, high-privacy defaults and minimal data processing (Article 8(2)-(4))
• Parental control tools covering account and feature settings, parental approval and spending limits for paid transactions, usage-time monitoring and limits, and location sharing; the child must be told when controls are activated (Article 9)
• Free appeal mechanism in Turkish against verification results, suspensions, closures and segregated-service measures, decided with meaningful human review, with annual statistics reported to the Directorate and published (Article 10)

Compliance & Enforcement

Primary Source