UAE Cabinet Mandates 15-Plus Age Rule for Social Media, 12-Month Compliance Window

Governments have periodically set age thresholds to shield minors—Britain’s 1833 Factory Act barred children under nine from textile mills, while the US COPPA law of 1998 limited data harvesting from the under-13 crowd online. The UAE’s edict fits this lineage: a state using regulation to protect (and simultaneously surveil) youth amid a moral panic over mental health and predators. It also deepens a post-COVID trend toward ‘digital borders’ where each jurisdiction demands its own compliance stack, foreshadowing further fragmentation of the global internet much as radio spectrum regulation balkanised broadcasting in the 1920s. Over a century, today’s rule may matter less for the ban itself—which tech-savvy kids will likely route around—than for normalising government-mandated biometric ID on every log-in, a precedent that could redefine anonymity online for generations.