Gabon Publishes Ordinance Requiring Age Verification and Personal Identification for Social Media

Gabon published an ordinance on April 8, 2026, regulating social media platforms with requirements including age verification, setting a digital age of majority at 16, allowing minors under 16 to have accounts only with parental consent, and mandating that anyone joining a platform provide their name, address and personal identification number. The age verification process goes further than requirements in other countries, which typically require only verified age rather than full personal identification, and follows Gabon's High Authority for Communication temporarily blocking social media entirely in February 2026 due to concerns about false information, cyberbullying and data collection practices.

Requiring users to submit name, address and personal identification number to access social media creates a centralised repository of identity data that itself becomes a safeguarding risk if breached, imposes a disproportionate privacy burden on adults and children alike, and displaces rather than prevents harm by pushing young people and offenders to platforms and jurisdictions that do not enforce the requirement. Guardii enables platforms to meet child-safety obligations without collecting or storing identity documents by detecting grooming, sextortion, CSAM and cyberbullying in real time at the conversational level, blocking harmful contact regardless of what identity information the user provided at registration, and alerting the relevant authority when a child is in danger, so that protection is targeted to the harm rather than applied as a universal surveillance condition of access.