Greece Invented the Public Square. Now It's Banning Social Media.
The peer-reviewed science is messy, but the companies' findings are clearer. After two decades of platforms running experiments on kids, is it regulators' turn?
The Athenians who invented the public square did not let children into it. The agora was for citizens — adult men who had been educated, trained, and prepared for the rough business of public life. Their standards weren’t perfect, nor perfectly equitable: the Athenians also excluded women and enslaved people. But childhood, they understandably decided, was for paideia, the long shaping of a person into someone ready to stand in the square: literature, music, philosophy, athletics, moral instruction, the whole slow formation of character that the German classicist Werner Jaeger spent three volumes trying to describe. You grew into the square. You did not grow up inside it. The Athenians understood the agora as the beating heart of their democracy, and they also understood that kids were not ready for it.
Now Greece is pulling its children off social media.
Starting January 1, 2027, children under 15 will be banned from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Snapchat. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced the decision in a TikTok — a platform his own government is about to wall off from a generation of Greek kids. He kicked it off with a 6-7 joke:
Greece is not alone, and it is not first. Australia’s ban took effect December 10, 2025, covering YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, and Kick. The UK, Malaysia, France, Denmark, and Poland are either considering bans or actively legislating them. Platforms that fail to restrict under-15 users in Greece will face fines under the EU Digital Services Act of up to 6% of global turnover — not a parking ticket, real money. Mitsotakis also wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen this week, pushing for an EU-wide “digital age of majority” at 15, with mandatory age verification across all platforms by the end of 2026. He wants Greece to lead the EU into something much bigger.
The EU’s appetite for regulating the information ecosystem is rooted in deep and traumatic experience.
As former EU parliament member Marietje Schaake once put it to me, “we’ve seen what happens when you let the media market have whatever it wants.” Germany’s postwar prohibition on Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial is grounded in a constitutional concept called streitbare Demokratie — “militant democracy,” the idea that a free society has both the right and the obligation to defend itself from forces that would dismantle it from within. That principle, forged in the ashes of the Weimar Republic’s collapse, is a philosophical foundation the United States never built. (At least not yet.) The EU Digital Services Act — which already bans targeted advertising to children and gives regulators direct authority over platforms’ algorithmic design — is a lineal descendant of that tradition: the belief that some speech environments are too dangerous to leave entirely to the market. Europe regulates speech environments. America litigates them.
