This Week in Internet Freedom — October 12th–16th, 2026
Türkiye Banned Social Media for Under-15s
Türkiye published a law formally banning children under 15 from social media platforms, with a November 1 enforcement date. Age verification will run through a government-issued token tied to Türkiye’s e-Devlet identity portal; platforms must implement the necessary technical measures or face fines, advertising bans, and bandwidth restrictions. The law also restricts 15- to 17-year-olds from services with "addictive" features.
Türkiye joins Australia, the EU, and a growing list of countries imposing age restrictions — but the enforcement context matters: Freedom House rated Türkiye’s internet "not free" in 2025, and last week a Turkish court blocked a news website over what it deemed "LGBT propaganda." The infrastructure that will verify a child's age is the same infrastructure that issued that order.
Greece Unveiled Its Social Media Ban for Under-15s
Greece's government presented a regulatory framework banning children under 15 from Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms to be added gradually, with a January 1st, 2027 start date subject to a parliamentary vote on October 22nd. Unlike Türkiye’s model — which routes age verification through the government's own e-Devlet portal — Greece is building its enforcement on the EU's Digital Services Act framework, using existing DSA oversight and sanction mechanisms rather than national infrastructure.
Greece already banned mobile phones in schools in 2024 and has a Kids Wallet App allowing parents to restrict children's device access. The January 2027 date places Greece in the same rapidly filling enforcement calendar as Türkiye (November 1st), the EU KIDS Act, and similar measures advancing across Europe and Canada.
Delhi Has Had Eight Internet Shutdowns in Ten Months
According to SFLC data, Delhi recorded eight internet shutdown incidents in 2026 up to October — 25% of India's national total — triggered by NEET paper leak protests in July and Chief Election Commissioner resignation protests in October. India's overall shutdown count has declined significantly from a peak of 136 in 2018 to 32 in 2026, the lowest since 2016.
But India still ranked second globally for shutdowns in 2025 with 65 incidents, behind only Myanmar. India's Supreme Court stated this year that "internet facilities should function unhindered." The October shutdowns followed anyway, spreading across a wider area of the capital than the July wave, in response to citizens protesting an appointment process.
EU Regulators Want Smart Glasses to Warn Nearby Phones
The European Data Protection Board issued recommendations on Tuesday requiring smart glasses to combine flashing lights, audio alerts, and phone notifications to bystanders when recording — guidance that will shape how national regulators assess GDPR compliance, even though it isn't binding law. The statement also clarifies that manufacturers and connected app providers may bear GDPR responsibility alongside users, and that the household exemption doesn't apply when footage of others is shared publicly on social media.
The guidance puts direct pressure on Meta, Samsung, Google, and Apple, all of whom are active in or entering the smart glasses market on the premise that the devices are discreet. The EDPB's recommendations, if they harden into regulatory expectation, would require them to be the opposite.
The Philippines Senate Passed a Total Social Media Ban
The Philippines Senate approved the SMART KIDS Act — SB 2424 — banning all children under 18 from social media and other "high-risk digital services," with no pathway for parental override and government ID required as the primary age verification method. The bill expands coverage to online gaming platforms with social networking functions, names Roblox and Gorebox explicitly, and applies to platforms of any size with no minimum audience threshold.
The Senate version must be reconciled with the House bill — which set the threshold at 13 with tiered access for older minors — before becoming law. At 18 with no parental override, it goes further than Australia (16), Türkiye (15), Greece (15), or the EU KIDS Act (15).
SpaceX Restricted Starlink for Ukrainian Military Without Warning
According to Ukrainska Pravda, SpaceX restricted Starshield terminals — the military-grade version of Starlink used by Ukrainian drone operators — without prior notice, causing drones to lose connection mid-mission and a number of operations to fail.
Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said the restrictions "can't be a coincidence and are connected to the current political situation" — pointing to a week in which the US reportedly threatened to halt intelligence sharing and arms deliveries to Ukraine. SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. Critical military communications infrastructure operated by a private company can be throttled without warning, for reasons that may be political, with no accountability to the military depending on it.
US Court Lifted the Block on Georgia's Age Verification Law
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the preliminary injunction blocking Georgia's SB 351 on Thursday, sending the age verification law back to district court for full proceedings. The law — passed in 2024 and blocked in 2025 after NetChoice sued — requires "commercially reasonable efforts" to verify ages, parental consent for under-16s, and limits on data collection and ad targeting for minors.
The appeals court found NetChoice hadn't adequately demonstrated the law would be unconstitutional across its full range of applications, noting some platforms host content protected for adults but not minors. The ruling doesn't settle the law's constitutionality; it removes the block and reopens the case. It arrives in a week when Türkiye published its ban, Greece presented its framework, and the Philippines Senate passed a total ban for under-18s.
The Health Information Girls Need Gets Filtered
Content filters built to block explicit material routinely catch puberty, menstruation, and reproductive health information too — because the vocabulary overlaps and filters match words, not meaning. A health charity's clearly written article using correct anatomical terms is more likely to be caught than vague or coded content that slips through.
Girls with school health education or an adult they can ask have a fallback; many have neither, and for them the search was the whole plan. The problem is also the inverse: recommendation systems deliver appearance-focused content to girls who didn't ask for it, and surface manosphere material to boys that research has linked to sexist attitudes in schools. Nobody decided that should happen. It's what a system produces when the metric is whether you kept watching.
What the DSA Transparency Database Actually Shows
Before the EU's Digital Services Act, platform transparency meant a quarterly PDF with aggregate numbers in categories defined by the company publishing them. The DSA replaced that with a legal obligation: every content moderation decision made by a covered platform must be filed with a reason, in standardized fields, in a public database.
That shift — from voluntary summaries to mandatory per-decision records — produces something that didn't exist before: a record that separates content removed because it broke the law from content removed because a platform didn't want it, and that indicates whether a government authority was involved. Informal pressure and phone calls still don't appear. But what was put in writing now has to be disclosed, and the existence of the database proves that granular, continuous transparency is possible when a law requires it.
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Gintarė is a cybersecurity writer at Mysterium VPN, where she explores online privacy, VPN technology, and the latest digital threats in editorial pieces. With hands-on experience researching and writing about data protection and digital freedom, Gintarė makes complex security topics accessible and actionable.
