Türkiye Is Building State Age Checks for Social Media

Key Takeaways

• Türkiye’s Family and Social Services Minister confirmed the government is developing an age-verification system tied to e-Devlet, the state's own identity portal, to enforce a new ban on social media for under-15s.
• The law, published in the Official Gazette on May 1, takes effect on November 1st after a six-month transition period. It covers both social media platforms and digital gaming.
• Platforms must offer a restricted version of their services to users aged 15–17, provide parental controls, and publicly explain the measures they have taken.
• Foreign gaming platforms with more than 100,000 daily users in Turkey must appoint a local representative.
• Türkiye had blocked more than 1.26 million website addresses by the end of 2024, according to monitoring by the Freedom of Expression Association.

Türkiye’s Government Will Verify Your Age to Let You Online

According to the Turkish Minute, Türkiye is building an age-verification system that routes through e-Devlet, the country's government services portal, to enforce a new law banning social media access for children under 15. Family and Social Services Minister Mahinur Özdemir Göktaş said the system would confirm whether a user meets the minimum age requirement without disclosing their underlying identity to the platforms themselves. 

The law was published in Türkiye’s Official Gazette on May 1st and takes effect on November 1st after a six-month transition period.

The broader context matters here. Türkiye had blocked more than 1.26M website addresses by the end of 2024, according to the Freedom of Expression Association's EngelliWeb monitoring project. Roblox was court-ordered offline in August 2024 over child safety concerns, and Discord followed two months later.

Platforms that fail to comply with Turkish authorities can face fines, advertising bans, and bandwidth restrictions. That is the enforcement environment into which the new age-check infrastructure is being inserted.

What the Law Actually Requires

The obligations land on both sides of the age line. Social network providers must refuse service to under-15s and implement verification to enforce it. For users aged 15-17, platforms must offer a differentiated version of their services and publicly explain the safeguards they have put in place. Parental controls covering account settings, purchases, subscriptions, and usage time limits are required across the board.

Gaming platforms face their own set of rules. Age classification becomes mandatory, and any game without a rating defaults to the highest age category. Foreign gaming platforms with more than 100,000 daily users in Türkiye must appoint a local representative, bringing them within reach of Turkish regulatory authority. Further detail on classifications and obligations will be set out by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK).

The Infrastructure Question Nobody’s Answering

The government's stated design — confirm age through e-Devlet without sharing the underlying identity with the platforms — is the right framing for a privacy-preserving system on paper. In practice, it means the state becomes the gatekeeper for who can access social media and under what conditions, with a verification portal that already holds identity data on the Turkish population.

That is a different arrangement from a third-party age-check vendor, and not obviously a safer one for users whose government already operates one of the more aggressive internet filtering regimes in the world. The same infrastructure built to keep under-15s off Instagram can be pointed at other categories of access with no architectural change required. 

Türkiye’s record — more than a million blocked addresses, court-ordered takedowns of major platforms, documented large-scale compliance by tech companies with government removal and data requests — suggests the appetite for using that infrastructure broadly is already there.

The November 1st deadline is close. How the system handles errors, appeals, and users without reliable e-Devlet access has not been addressed publicly.