Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain would block children from using social media platforms including Instagram and TikTok in a new European push to regulate digital platforms.
Madrid wants to limit the use of the platforms by people younger than 16 years, Sánchez said at a summit in the United Arab Emirates Tuesday. To enforce the ban, the government will seek to order platforms to put age verification methods in place.
“Social networks have become a failed state in which laws are ignored, crimes are tolerated, and where disinformation is worth more than truth, and half of users suffer hate attacks,” Sánchez said.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gives a speech during the World Governments Summit in Dubai on February 3, 2026. © Photo credit: AFP
The announcement comes as part of a growing global trend aimed at limiting children and teenagers from accessing social media.
Australia introduced a ban that has removed around five million accounts, according to data published last month. French lawmakers voted in January to ban children under 15 from accessing media apps including Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram, ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and Snap Inc.’s Snapchat.
Separately, Elon Musk’s X offices in Paris were searched by French law enforcement’s cybercrime unit as part of an ongoing probe into alleged misuses of the social media platform.
The Spanish law would make executives legally responsible for violations on platforms such as Grok, TikTok, and Instagram, according to the Spanish prime minister. He added that CEOs would face criminal liability if they didn’t remove hateful or illegal content.
“It’s over to hide behind code and it’s over to say that technology is neutral,” Sánchez said, announcing a meeting of six European countries willing to go further than the EU’s current regulations.
President Donald Trump’s administration has bristled at Europe’s policies governing digital commerce, including its moves to regulate US tech giants, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta and Amazon.com Inc. The US said last month that if the EU continued “to restrict, limit, and deter the competitiveness of U.S. service providers,” it would target European companies with restrictions or fees.
Trump has repeatedly criticized so-called non-tariff barriers that he says are unfair to American tech firms. The EU has still moved ahead with enforcement of its digital regulations, recently imposing fines worth hundreds of millions of dollars against Apple Inc., Meta and X.
German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil this week called for tougher action against US digital platforms, arguing that these companies undermine democracy and harm European consumers.
“We must rein in the power of the American platforms,” Klingbeil said Monday. “We see monopolistic structures emerging that are not good for democratic discourse and not good for consumer protection.”