UAE joins nations putting age restrictions on social media

The UAE has become the first Arab country to introduce an age restriction for social media, opening up another potential market for biometric age assurance providers.

The UAE media office announced that a resolution ​approved today prohibits kids under 15 from creating, using or operating personal social media accounts – a year younger than the 16-and-up threshold that Australia and the UK have established. It will “require companies to ​implement ​robust age-verification measures, including digital identity checks ​and artificial intelligence-supported technologies.” Self-declaration ‌will not be acceptable.

In a variant on the graduated or bracketed model used in OS-level age checks, the UAE will require enhanced safeguards for accounts belonging to 15- and 16-year olds, such as access and screen time restrictions and parental controls.

The UAE addresses the question of circumvention by making it platforms’ problem. Platforms must “disable accounts created by children under 15, prevent users from circumventing age-verification systems and refrain from using children’s personal data for targeted advertising or behavioural profiling.” Parental consent cannot cancel out the rules.

The UAE says its framework aligns ​with global regulatory efforts that balance digital access with child online safety. In one sense, the resolution demonstrates the universality of the concern over youth and social media, and the transferability of models for legislation that mandate age assurance.

In another, it highlights the contextual spectrum across which age regulations are being applied. The UAE joins a list that now includes nations as widespread as Bangladesh, Canada, Indonesia, the UK, Brazil, Europe and Australia, the latter of which was the first nation to set the template for a social media minimum age requirement. As the trend continues, it will be worth observing how each nation applies its own variations on the theme, as a gauge of how universal age assurance laws – and the global market for age assurance technology – will prove to be over time.

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometrics  |  legislation  |  OS-level age verification  |  Saudi Arabia  |  social media