The UAE Cabinet has approved a resolution barring children under 15 from holding a social media account, state news agency Wam reported on Thursday, and enforcing it will mean verifying every user in the country, adult or child.
Anyone below 15 will be barred from creating, using or operating a personal account once the resolution is ratified and locked out of publishing, commenting, sharing and joining public groups or open channels. The Cabinet, led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, gave companies up to 12 months to comply.
The rules cover any platform reaching users in the country, free or paid, that ranks or recommends content through algorithms, which is to say nearly all of them.
The resolution states plainly that a user simply saying how old they are will no longer count. With self-declaration off the table, companies have to verify age some other way, and every available option, from identity documents to facial analysis to behavioral profiling, means each adult hands over more of themselves to prove they are not a child.
The resolution does carry privacy language and the wording reveals the tension at its center. Verification must “achieve a high level of accuracy…while adhering to the highest standards of child privacy and personal data protection.”
Platforms are told to minimize data collection and avoid keeping it longer than strictly necessary. Those constraints sit on top of a system whose whole purpose is to extract verified identity from people who previously surrendered none, and the second goal undercuts the first no matter how carefully the first is phrased.
The Cabinet framed the resolution as an effort to “establish an advanced model for child protection in the digital space, reinforcing the national digital safety framework in line with the rapid evolution of technology use, and striking a balance between enabling responsible use of modern technologies and ensuring the highest standards of child protection.”
Teenagers aged 15 and 16 may stay on, with what the resolution calls enhanced protective measures including “age-appropriate content classification and restriction, disabling high-risk features such as interaction with unknown users, regulation of usage time and duration, and the provision of parental control tools.”
The UAE is not acting alone and that is the development with the longest reach. French President Emmanuel Macron thanked the country for “joining the movement,” a global agenda that already spans Australia, the UK, and his own push in France.
Each government cites child protection and each builds the same thing underneath, a verified link between a real person and an online account.
