Turkey Publishes Age Verification Regulation for Social Network Providers

Turkey published the Regulation on the Provision of Child Specific Segregated Services and Age Verification by Social Network Providers in the Official Gazette on 10 October 2026, entering into force on 1 November 2026. The regulation prohibits social network providers from offering services to children under fifteen and mandates age verification through tokens generated via the e-Government Gateway, requiring all existing accounts to be verified by 31 March 2027.

Detecting contact or coercion before it escalates is a different proposition from forcing every adult and child to prove their age at the door. Guardii deploys pattern-recognition algorithms that flag grooming escalation, sextortion, and age-inappropriate contact in direct-message streams on platforms including Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, surfacing the child at risk to a parent, school or safeguarding professional without creating a national database of who is logged in. Where a regulation imposes an access threshold, targeted detection addresses the harm itself, identifying hostile contact and intervention points in real time rather than restricting compliant users or displacing offenders to unmonitored channels.