The wave of global teen “community ban” orders is accelerating—will Taiwan follow suit?

The French Senate passed on Monday a bill to suspend social media use for children under 15, which could become the latest major legislative follow-up by a country after Australia. Although Taiwan has not moved to a blanket ban, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has already announced proposed amendments to Article 59 of the Child and Youth Welfare and Rights Protection Act, aiming to establish an age identification and restricted access mechanism.
(Background: The UK will legislate to ban social media use for under-16s: TikTok, IG, FB, X are all on the list, as a global regulatory wave continues to expand.)
(Additional context: The EU is advancing a “chat monitoring” draft—private messages on IG, Discord, Gmail… are all included in the scanning.)

Table of contents

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• Global wave: two routes diverge
• Article 59 of the Child and Youth Welfare Act: age identification plus restricted access
• The privacy cost and concerns about a digital Great Wall
• What to watch isn’t the ban, it’s the infrastructure

The French Senate passed this week on the 21st a bill banning children under 15 from using social media. If the lower house subsequently follows with a vote and the bill passes, France will become the main country after Australia to ban teenagers from using social media. According to reports, the new law will take effect on September 1. Users under 15 may not open social media accounts. Platforms will have an additional four months to close existing accounts and must adopt an age verification mechanism approved by France’s privacy regulator.

French Deputy Minister for AI affairs L’Hénan described France as the first country in Europe to introduce “digital adult age.” Behind this legislative push is President Macron’s public call earlier this April. He urged young people to put down their phones, read more books, and said plainly that “social media use may not resume before age 15.”

Over the past six months, at least more than 20 countries worldwide have implemented, announced, or discussed restricting minors’ use of social media. The age thresholds have generally fallen between 15 and 16, so what about Taiwan?

Currently, Taiwan is not taking the route of a blanket ban like Australia or France. However, it has quietly started down another path: on April 21, 2026, the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced a proposed amendment to Article 59 of the Child and Youth Welfare and Rights Protection Act, embedding two keys—an “age identification mechanism” and “a restricted access disposition.” Though this approach appears mild, critics believe its endpoint could be more troublesome than a ban.

Global wave: two routes diverge

In December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to ban social media use for users under 16, covering 10 platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, and Kick. For platform violations, the maximum penalty can be 49.5 million Australian dollars. Age verification uses a flexible “reasonable steps” standard that does not require a specific technology. As a result, massive workarounds appeared on the first day of implementation. Teenagers bypass the restrictions using VPNs, borrowing parents’ accounts, and other methods.

Denmark followed closely after. In November 2025, consensus was reached among parties to ban social media use for those under 15. Legislation is expected to be completed by mid-2026, and an app called “Digital Evidence” will be launched with built-in age verification functionality.

At the EU level, the heat is also rising. EU Commission President von der Leyen pledged to introduce a draft law this autumn in response to expert group recommendations to “ban under-13s.” As of early 2026, 13 EU countries—Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Czechia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, and Greece, among others—have committed to follow up. Worth noting is that on July 6, 2026, the EU Commission said this French law “does not fully comply” with existing EU regulations, but it still supports the direction of related initiatives.

Looking across this wave, it can be summarized into two main routes: one is the “direct age ban” in the style of Australia and France—clearly set thresholds and prohibit opening accounts; the other is the combination of “age verification plus restricted access,” which does not directly ban, but uses identity verification to tier content and, when necessary, block access.

Taiwan has chosen the second path.

Article 59 of the Child and Youth Welfare Act: age identification plus restricted access

Taiwan’s move is not as high-profile as Australia’s. On April 21, 2026, the Ministry of Health and Welfare issued a notice of its proposed amendment to the Child and Youth Welfare and Rights Protection Act, opening a 30-day public comment period. Article 59, paragraphs 1 and 2 of the draft provide for an “age identification mechanism”: the communications and broadcasting competent authority, the NCC, will convene and integrate “content protection institutions” to promote “age-appropriate identification.” The standards, methods, exceptions, and technical requirements for age identification will be further set by the NCC together with the Ministry of Digital Development. Paragraph 3 provides for a “restricted access disposition”: if the competent authority finds harmful content, it must notify the platform to remove it; “when necessary, it may notify an Internet access service provider of the disposition to restrict access.”

In other words, Taiwan does not directly tell platforms “no account opening for under-15s.” Instead, it builds an infrastructure that identifies users’ ages and then tier-restricts access to content. Common age identification methods in Taiwan today include self-declaration, AI facial age estimation, uploading government ID documents, credit card verification, and mobile phone number实名 linkage. The common point is that all require users to disclose identity—which is precisely where the controversy begins.

Privacy costs and concerns about an internet Great Wall

The Civil Association for Judicial Reform directly pointed to three major risks. In its statement, the Association said first is the privacy risk: age verification mechanisms require users to disclose identity, which amounts to requiring large-scale collection of personal data, and once leaked, the consequences are hard to estimate. Second is the issue of blanket authorization: the parent law does not clearly specify a data minimization principle, nor does it prohibit secondary use for purposes other than the original one, violating the legislative spirit of tiered legal reservation. Third is the risk of network blocking: the “restricted access” provisions lack due process—no prior review, no published list, and no remedy mechanism. The Association therefore recommends deleting the restricted access provisions in paragraph 3.

Amnesty International Taiwan has also expressed concern, saying that Article 59 potentially infringes privacy rights, rights to anonymity, and freedom of expression, and could evolve into excessive surveillance and unclear review. Members of the Legislative Yuan have also already intervened, and concerns about an “internet Great Wall” from outside circles have not been without basis. Looking at the numbers, in 2025 in Taiwan’s blocked domains under the RPZ mechanism, about 64% were implemented directly by the government under the Fraud Crime Harm Prevention Act. This shows that the restricted-access infrastructure already has precedents in Taiwan; it’s just that this time the scope would expand into the area of child and youth protection.

Then consider the lesson from Australia: an age verification system claiming to protect teenagers was bypassed on the first day of implementation, and instead exposed identity information of adult users to the system first. This is the gap opponents fear most: the protective purpose fails, yet the surveillance infrastructure is deployed first.

What to watch isn’t the ban—it’s the infrastructure

Zooming out, Taiwan is unlikely to copy Australia or France’s blanket ban at this stage. The draft is still in the public comment stage, disputes over due process for “restricted access” have not been resolved, and legislative progress may not go smoothly. But the real focus should be whether, once built, the “age verification plus restricted access” infrastructure will be repurposed.

An identity recognition system used to block inappropriate content for children and youth could, technically, also be used to block political speech and restrict specific media. The difference is only who flips the switch, and whether there are transparent review and remedy procedures. This is also why the Association for Judicial Reform’s demand is not to oppose child and youth protection, but to remove the “restricted access” provisions that lack due process.

Worth noting are industry-side reactions: increasingly strict age verification and blocking mechanisms are pushing some users toward social platforms that are difficult to centrally regulate, such as decentralized social platforms like Nostr and Bluesky. This aligns with a trend previously observed by BlockTempo in coverage of the ban in Australia: the tighter the regulation, the more apparent the appeal of decentralized alternatives.

The next three time points are worth watching closely: the Legislative Yuan’s push-and-pull after Taiwan’s child and youth act amendment public comment period of 30 days ends; whether an EU Commission draft law introduced this autumn sets the Taiwan model or the Australia model as the European standard; and whether age verification technology itself can find a balance between “accurate identification” and “minimizing personal data collection.”