Child safety and age verification laws in SWANA: protection on paper, risk in practice

Read in Arabic / للقراءة بالعربية

Across the SWANA region, governments are introducing or debating new rules for social media. Some draw on the EU's Digital Services Act, the bloc's 2022 law requiring platforms to be more transparent about content moderation and to tackle the spread of illegal content, and propose similar obligations for platforms operating in their own countries. Others focus specifically on children, citing the UK's Online Safety Act and Australia's under-16 social media ban as they propose age verification requirements or outright bans on minors using certain apps. The justification offered is almost always the same, protecting children from harmful content and holding platforms accountable.

This wave of regulation is arriving at a politically charged moment. Youth-led protests have swept several countries in the region over the past year, organised in large part through platforms like Discord, TikTok, and Instagram. Social media has also been central to how people across the region have documented and shared information about Israel's war on Gaza since October 2023, often in the face of active suppression. Skyline has repeatedly condemned the systemic and global censorship of pro-Palestinian content, aligning with Human Rights Watch's documentation of over a thousand instances of content removal, account suspension, and shadow banning of Palestine-related posts since October 2023.

Any conversation about regulating young people's access to social media in SWANA is happening against this backdrop, where platforms have already shown themselves willing to restrict speech under political and government pressure, and it is worth keeping in view.

We took a look at developments across the region to map where things stand.

Morocco

Morocco is moving on two fronts at once when it comes to digital platforms. On one side, the government has been developing plans to expand the powers of its broadcast regulator HACA into a digital watchdog, an effort Minister of Youth, Culture and Communication Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid announced in May 2025, giving HACA authority to monitor digital platforms and requiring them to appoint a legal representative in Morocco, implement content moderation systems, and submit regular reports on removed content, even where those platforms have no physical presence in the country. Bensaid described the EU's Digital Services Act as "one of the most advanced texts globally" and said Morocco's framework would draw on it. A separate April 2025 government decree expanded the Ministry of Communications' powers to address what officials called "fake news."

On the other side is a push to restrict children's access specifically. A bill filed by the Progress and Socialism group in April 2026 would ban under-13s from creating accounts on gaming platforms, require mandatory parental controls for those aged 13 to 18, and require platforms to deploy reliable age verification technology. Providers that fail to comply face fines of up to one million dirhams, while parents found responsible for repeated unsupervised access by their children could see internet service to their home suspended by court order. A separate, broader bill would ban under-16s from Facebook and TikTok. Neither has been adopted, and both would sit within Morocco's existing data protection law, which leaves data processing for state security, defence, or criminal investigations entirely outside the oversight of its data protection authority, the CNDP.

The protests that swept Morocco in September 2025 offer useful context for any conversation about platform regulation in the country. Young people organised largely through Discord, where the GenZ 212 server grew from around 3,000 members to over 130,000 within days. The protests, which called for improvements to public healthcare and education, were among the largest in the country in years. Three people were reportedly killed during the unrest, and security forces arrested hundreds more. More than 2,400 people were later charged by Morocco's public prosecutor in connection with the protests.

Egypt

On January 25, 2026, President Sisi directed parliament to fast-track legislation restricting children's access to social media, citing the need to end what he called "digital chaos." Parliament responded within 24 hours, pledging to produce a law to "protect Egyptian children from any risks that threaten their thoughts and behaviour." By February 2026, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly was chairing meetings to develop a broader regulatory framework requiring platforms to strengthen online safety standards, with a government committee tasked with drafting the legislation. A separate proposal from April 2026 under review in parliament called for a dedicated state-run national social media platform, alongside regulation of foreign platforms operating in Egypt.

Egypt's 2020 Personal Data Protection Law carves out explicit exemptions for national security authorities, including the presidency, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Interior, and the General Intelligence Service. Any law requiring identity verification for social media access would operate within this existing legal framework, where the bodies most likely to seek access to user data are explicitly outside its core protections.

UAE

The UAE has the most developed legal framework in the region for child digital safety. Federal Decree-Law No. 26 of 2025 on Child Digital Safety came into force on January 1, 2026, requiring platforms operating in or targeting users in the UAE to implement age verification, default high-privacy settings for children's accounts, content filtering tools, restrictions on targeted advertising to minors, and prohibitions on collecting personal data of children under 13 without explicit parental consent. Platforms face blocking, suspension, or closure for non-compliance, with detailed penalties to be set out in forthcoming cabinet regulations. In June 2026, a further cabinet resolution banned children under 15 from creating or using social media accounts at all, requiring platforms to monitor and disable underage accounts or risk being blocked.

The law explicitly references the EU's DSA, the UK's Online Safety Act, and Australia's under-16 ban as comparative models. Enforcement sits with the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority. The UAE's own data protection law, Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 still does not have its executive regulations fully in force, which means some of the data protection safeguards referenced in the new child safety law remain without detailed enforcement mechanisms in practice.

Jordan

In early 2026, Jordanian parliamentarians introduced proposals to restrict social media access for under-16s, and the government formed a national committee to study age verification mechanisms, with its mandate including a review of international models such as the UK Online Safety Act and the Australian ban. No legislation has passed yet and no executive action has been taken.

Separately, Jordan's Telecommunications Regulatory Commission reportedly asked Roblox in September 2025 to remove its chat features within the kingdom, citing concerns about children's exposure to inappropriate content and interactions with strangers online.

Freedom House rates Jordan as "partly free" in its 2025 internet freedom assessments. This is relevant context for any future framework that would require platforms operating in Jordan to verify and store identity data for users, particularly young users.

Tunisia

Since 2024, the Ministry of Family has been implementing a National Action Plan for protecting children in the digital space, running through 2028, developed jointly with the Ministry of Communication Technologies. As part of it, the two ministries launched a National Charter on November 19, 2025, bringing telecom operators, internet service providers, and civil society into a shared framework, and the government went on to declare 2026 "Digital Safety Year" for childhood. The charter is voluntary, relying on the institutions that signed it to follow through rather than on any binding legal requirement.

In March 2026, a member of Tunisia's National Council of Regions and Districts, Fahmi Mabrouk, presented a proposal to ban under-13s from social media, require fingerprint-based parental verification for use between 13 and 16, and impose financial penalties for non-compliance, citing Australia's law as a model. Mabrouk said the Ministry of Women and Childhood has welcomed the proposal, which remains under technical review. The reliance on fingerprint verification is worth flagging on its own terms. Tunisia's data protection law dates to 2004, predates modern biometric processing, and has long been criticised as outdated, while biometric data, unlike most personal data, cannot be changed if compromised. A GDPR-aligned reform bill was introduced in 2018 and reintroduced in 2025, but neither version has been adopted.

All of this sits within a country where Decree-Law No. 2022-54, issued in September 2022 to combat cybercrime and "false information," has become the primary tool used against journalists in Tunisia. Skyline International for Human Rights has documented recent cases including journalist Zied El Hani, sentenced in May 2026 to a year in prison over a Facebook post criticising judges, and journalists Mourad Zghidi and Borhane Bessis, sentenced in January 2026 to three and a half years for critical commentary. Lawyer and commentator Sonia Dahmani was released in November 2025 but still faces cases carrying potential sentences of 10 to 20 years. In October 2025, labourer Saber Ben Chouchane was sentenced to death over Facebook posts criticising the president, the first capital sentence for online speech since Tunisia's moratorium on executions began in 1991, before being released days later following a presidential pardon. It is the same decree, and the same legal environment, that any future child digital safety law in Tunisia would be built alongside.

Lebanon

On February 26, 2026, the Council of Ministers adopted Decision No.13, establishing an inter-ministerial committee tasked with preparing a national strategy to regulate and guide children's use of the internet and digital applications. Separately, in February 2026, MP Tony Frangieh introduced a bill to ban social media use for children under 14. In 2025, MP Bilal Abdallah had put forward a separate proposal, developed with the organisation Nidal Lel Insen, to amend the penal code and strengthen penalties for the online exploitation of children. None of these proposals has yet been passed into law.

Lebanon's National Human Rights Commission published a report in May 2026 examining these developments alongside the broader legal landscape. The report noted that Lebanon's existing legal framework, including the penal code, Law No. 422/2002, Law No. 293/2014, and Law No. 81/2018 on electronic transactions and personal data, offers only partial protection in the digital sphere and does not amount to a comprehensive framework. Digital rights organisation SMEX has raised questions about digital sovereignty, transparency, and the risks of public-private technology partnerships, including a training agreement with Oracle announced in December 2025, and has noted that Law No. 81/2018 remains incompletely implemented with no strong independent oversight mechanism in place.

What needs to happen

Nobody is arguing children should be unprotected online. The harms are real, and they deserve real answers. But the laws on the table right now in this region were not built with children primarily in mind. They were built quickly, by ministries and committees, in countries where the tools being proposed could just as easily be turned to other purposes.

If a government wants to introduce age verification, the test is simple. Is the data collected strictly limited to what proving someone's age requires? Is there a clear deadline for when it gets deleted? Is there a body that can actually say no to a request for that data, one that does not report to the same ministry asking for it? None of the proposals mapped here currently pass that test, largely because none of these countries have yet built the institutions that would let them pass it.

That is the conversation that keeps getting skipped. Laws move forward before the safeguards that would make them safe are in place. Fix that order, and age verification stops carrying the risk of becoming something closer to identity verification for going online at all. 

The other thing missing is young people themselves. Every proposal in this piece came out of a ministry or a parliamentary committee, with no visible role for the children or young people whose access is being restricted. That is not a small gap. A law written without that input is more likely to default to restriction than to actually address what young people face online. 

We will keep tracking these laws as they move from proposal to practice, because that is exactly where the risk takes shape.