Spain will pursue age restrictions for social media platforms and new regulations on AI, as the global legislative tide continues to turn against Big Tech. Reuters reports that Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is seeking a “common European approach” to online safety legislation and rules around biometric age assurance tech, to strengthen enforcement across the EU.

“The profit of four tech companies cannot come at the expense of rights of millions,” Sanchez says. “What isn’t legal in the real world cannot be legal in the virtual world. Full stop.”

Coverage doesn’t name the four companies, but it’s easy enough to guess, and ultimately they work as an unofficial coalition united against regulations that threaten their grip on global communications. Sanchez confirms as much, noting that “powerful voices” are constantly lobbying against laws that would require them to curb their services or disclose information about their algorithms.

Any questions about why they have made pushing back against laws a core part of their operations were answered by the California jury who ruled that Meta and Google had designed their products to be addictive to children, and ignored resulting harms. Or, by the stretch of time late last year during which Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot made a habit of pumping out nonconsensual deepfake porn at industrial scale.

In the wake of Spain’s announcement, Musk took to his platform, X, to call Sanchez a tyrant and a totalitarian.

75% of EU citizens support social media minimum age rule

Musk, one of the richest men in the world, likely thinks the same about European Commission president Ursula von der Leyden, who recently suggested that legislation proposing a “social media delay” across the bloc could be coming in the next few months.

The BBC quotes von der Leyden’s address to an EU summit in Copenhagen, in which she says “the discussion about a minimum age for social media can no longer be ignored.”

On this, she can defer to parents. A new survey from Politico says three in four European citizens think governments should set minimum ages for social media.

“Half of respondents said the minimum age should be 16, while one in four said the age should be between 13 and 15. Only 4 percent said there should be no age restrictions for social media use, while 22 percent said restrictions should be left up to parents.”

It is little wonder, then, that so many governments are thinking along the same lines as Spain, which follows the lead of Australia, where the world’s first social media age law went into effect in December 2025. The UK, France, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Türkiye, Canada, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia and India are all active in seeking or enacting legislation to put age limits on the largest social media platforms.

Social media’s grip on the world slipping

Ursula von der Leyden nails the problem with rare acuity in stating that “the question is not whether young people should have access to social media. The question is whether social media should have access to young people.”

The situation as it stands is as follows: a handful of men incubated in the hothouse of Silicon Valley have turned their social media companies into global tech sandboxes, in which users are the sand. Because they are the richest men in the world, and have been for some time, they are fundamentally divorced from everyday reality, insatiable for more power and wealth, and largely shielded from serious consequences by the size of their fortunes and the political allies they have made. They have increasingly crafted their products to be addictive on purpose, particularly for children, which has resulted in harms to users. This has been decided in a U.S. court.

A global outcry from parents has spurred legislation to try and limit kids’ access to these spaces designed to hook them. But the social media firms have gassed their PR machines to convince a significant percentage of people that they are a public good on par with libraries, and an important place for children to make connections. Meanwhile, they ignore laws, suppress information, push back against courts, and draw from their bottomless well of money to mount legal challenges to online safety laws and fines for noncompliance.

There is only so much longer that digital rights groups, privacy advocates and First Amendment crusaders can ignore what is becoming clear: these are among the most callous, arrogant and toxic companies in existence, and it is time for the world to reckon with the amount of power and influence we have given them.

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometrics  |  children  |  EU age verification  |  Europe  |  legislation  |  social media  |  Spain