Spain’s Sánchez Plans Under-16 Social Media Ban, Threatens Criminal Liability for Tech Executives

At a global showcase for techno-optimism in Dubai, Spain’s prime minister used his time on stage to deliver a stark warning instead.

“Social networks have become a failed state,” Pedro Sánchez told world leaders gathered at the World Governments Summit on Feb. 3. They are, he said, a “digital Wild West” where “laws are ignored and crimes are tolerated,” and where children are exposed to “addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation [and] violence.”

His government’s response, Sánchez announced, will be one of the toughest crackdowns on social media yet attempted in a European democracy: a legal ban on social media access for anyone under 16 in Spain and a new criminal regime that could expose top tech executives to prosecution if their platforms’ algorithms help spread illegal or hateful content.

The measures, which Sánchez said will be introduced in a bill as early as next week, would place Spain at the forefront of a growing international push to restrict minors’ access to social platforms and tighten the rules on how those platforms operate. They also raise complex questions about privacy, free expression and how far national laws can go beyond existing European Union rules.

From age limit to outright prohibition

Spain already has a wide-ranging draft law on the books, the Organic Law for the Protection of Minors in the Digital Environment, sent to Parliament in 2025. That proposal would raise the minimum age for opening accounts on social networks from 14 to 16 and tighten controls around pornography, deepfakes, grooming and other online harms.

In public, though, Sánchez framed the next step more bluntly. “Spain will ban access to social media for minors under 16,” he said in Dubai, adding that platforms will be required to implement “effective age-verification systems” — “not just check boxes, but real barriers that work.”

Details of the new bill have not yet been published, and it is not clear whether any exceptions will remain for younger teenagers whose parents consent to them being online. Earlier descriptions of the draft law envisaged parental overrides in some cases for users aged 14 to 15. Sánchez did not mention such carveouts in his speech.

The ban is expected to cover major social networks such as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and X, and could extend to forums, messaging services and online spaces that incorporate generative artificial intelligence tools, depending on how lawmakers define “social network” and “digital environment” in the final text.

Current Spanish law, which transposes the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, allows children 14 and older to consent to the processing of their personal data. Raising that threshold and turning it into a functional bar on opening accounts would mark a significant change in how teenagers in Spain can use the internet.

Algorithms under criminal law

Alongside restrictions on minors’ access, Sánchez said his government will present legal changes aimed directly at the companies that run social media platforms and their senior leadership.

The bill will seek to make “social media executives criminally liable” if they fail to remove illegal or hateful content, he said, particularly when children are harmed. It will also propose a new crime for “manipulating algorithms” to promote or amplify illegal content.

Spain already plans to criminalize certain forms of online abuse, including deepfake pornography and the dissemination of pornographic material to minors. What is new in Sánchez’s announcement is the explicit focus on recommendation systems and the personal exposure of executives.

How those offences will be defined in law remains unclear. Prosecutors will likely need to distinguish between intentional promotion of content, negligent design of systems and algorithmic outcomes that occur despite compliance with existing rules. Legal scholars say that will be difficult to square with the largely probabilistic way modern recommender systems work.

If enacted, the move would go beyond the EU’s flagship Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires large platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks from illegal and harmful content and to be more transparent about how their algorithms function, but enforces those obligations through fines and compliance orders rather than criminal prosecutions.

Under the DSA, the European Commission and national regulators can impose penalties of up to 6% of a platform’s global annual turnover for serious violations. Spain’s plan would add a separate layer of national criminal liability on top of that administrative framework.

A new coalition — and a wider trend

Sánchez also told the Dubai audience that Spain has joined five other European countries in what he called a “coalition of the digitally willing,” a loose grouping that aims to coordinate tougher action on social media and children’s online safety across borders.

He did not identify the other members. Governments in France, Denmark and Greece have all recently backed tighter age limits or outright bans on social networks for minors, and are widely seen by European officials as likely participants.

France’s National Assembly has already approved a bill that would bar children under 15 from using social media and restrict smartphone use in high schools, though it still needs Senate approval before taking effect. Denmark and Greece have each signaled support for bans covering under-15s.

Outside Europe, Australia became the first country to enforce a nationwide under-16 social media ban in December 2025. The Australian government says millions of underage accounts have been deleted, but early reports suggest many children still access platforms by using virtual private networks, older siblings’ credentials or by tricking AI-based age checks.

At the European Parliament, lawmakers adopted a non-binding resolution in 2025 calling for an EU-wide “digital majority” of 16 for social media, with parental consent allowed for users aged 13 to 16, and urging curbs on engagement-based recommender systems and loot boxes for minors. The Spanish initiative would effectively implement a stricter version of that proposal at the national level.

Age checks and privacy worries

Central to whether Spain’s ban will work is age verification — and how intrusive it will be.

Sánchez has insisted that platforms must use tools that “actually work,” signaling that simple self-declared birth dates will no longer be acceptable. Spanish officials have previously promoted work on an age-verification app and pushed for EU-wide solutions that can be used across services.

Possible models include using national identity documents or an EU digital identity wallet to prove age, outsourcing checks to third-party verification providers that confirm only whether a user is above or below a threshold, or deploying AI systems that estimate age from facial images.

Civil liberties and digital rights groups across Europe have warned that large-scale age checks risk creating a de facto identity layer on the internet, undermining the ability to browse or speak anonymously. They argue that tying access to a government-backed ID, or storing biometric data such as facial scans, could chill political speech and expose users to new privacy and security risks.

The Spanish government says the goal is narrowly focused on protecting minors and that systems can be designed with data minimization in mind. How those assurances are translated into binding legal safeguards will be a central issue as Parliament debates the bill.

Domestic politics and enforcement challenges

At home, Sánchez leads a center-left coalition of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and the Sumar alliance, which does not hold an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies and relies on support from regional parties. That has made passing contentious legislation difficult.

Child online safety, however, is one of the few areas where Spain’s main parties have signaled potential common ground. The conservative People’s Party has previously backed stricter age limits for social media and is expected to support at least some elements of the minors’ protection law. The far-right Vox party has criticized the initiative as an attempt to restrict speech and “make sure that no one criticizes” the government online.

Even if a bill passes, implementation will be complex. Lawmakers must decide which authority will oversee compliance — for example, the Spanish Data Protection Agency, the national telecoms regulator or a new body — and how its work will align with oversight of large platforms under the EU Digital Services Act, where the European Commission plays a central role.

Platforms, for their part, would face a stark choice in Spain: retool their services to keep under-16s out, redesign algorithmic systems to minimize legal risk, or risk fines and, in extreme cases, criminal investigations into their leaders.

Sánchez has framed the stakes in terms of childhood itself. Presenting data from a national “Digital Childhood” study last year, he said the government would raise the minimum age for social networks because “no click is worth more than a childhood or an adolescence.”

Whether Spain’s approach becomes a model or a cautionary tale may depend less on the strength of that sentiment than on the answers to more technical questions that now follow: how to verify ages without building a surveillance infrastructure, how to hold algorithms to account without stifling lawful expression — and how far parents, platforms and teenagers themselves are willing to accept the state’s effort to redraw the boundaries of growing up online.