Danish PM calls for social media ban for children

Social media is “stealing our children’s childhood”, says Danish PM

Danish Prime Minister sets out a plan to ban children from all social media warning that “we have unleashed a monster.”

Denmark’s government is planning to ban all social media for children under 15, warning that excessive social media usage is “stealing our children’s childhood”, in the words of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.

“We have unleashed a monster,” Frederiksen added.

However, the Danish Prime Minister did not provide details on how such a ban would be enforced, nor is there a Bill proposed on such an issue in the current Danish parliamentary year.

Just last year, a petition in Denmark calling for a ban on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram gathered 50,000 signatures.

Most social media sites already impose their own lower age limits, typically 13 in the UK and US, but LinkedIn and Telegram have an age limit of 16. Policing and enforcement of such policies, however, is another matter.

“According to the Prime Minister, figures from Børns Vilkår show that 94 per cent of Danish children in the seventh grade had a profile on a social media before they turned 13,” reports Danish media. It added that new EU guidelines introduced in July under the European Union’s Digital Services Act enable the Danish government to introduce more stringent age limits on online content.

The Danish Prime Minister’s call for a social media ban for under-15s was echoed by Caroline Stage Olsen, Denmark’s digitisation minister. “I've said it before, and I'll say it again: We've been too naive. We have left children's digital lives to platforms that have never had their well-being in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community,” she said.

The EU’s Digital Services Act mirrors the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), empowering the government to impose age checks on broad categories of online content to prevent under-18s from accessing them. This includes controls to prevent children from accessing porn, self-harm, suicide and eating disorder content.

In July 2025 when these age checks were introduced, the broadcast regulator Ofcom, tasked with enforcing the OSA, added that “sites that allow other forms of harmful content must also have highly effective age checks”.

It continued: “As well as preventing children from encountering the most harmful content relating to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography, Ofcom’s Codes also demand that online services act to protect children from dangerous stunts or challenges, misogynistic, violent, hateful or abusive material, and online bullying.”

Because of the onerous and costly nature of adhering to the legislation, not to mention the potential penalties of non-compliance, whether on-purpose or accidental, many websites in the UK have closed their discussion forums, while overseas operators have started blocking access from UK IP addresses. Calls to exempt smaller websites from the OSA’s most stringent regulations were rejected.

A legal challenge to the OSA verification rules by the Wikimedia Foundation was rejected, while Ofcom is also investigating overseas websites like 4Chan.

Ofcom claims that a sharp fall in access to pornographic websites from the UK as indicative of success; however, critics argue that people are simply using VPNs instead – often free ones of dubious provenance.

They also warn that the age checks demanded by the least salubrious of websites could provide a honeypot of compromising data and, therefore, an attractive target for hackers.

Moreover, the OSA and its enforcement by Ofcom has been criticised for encouraging websites of all type to introduce different forms of age verification. For example, the music streaming website Spotify now demands that UK users submit to facial scans to prove that they’re old enough to listen to Motorhead.