UAE Bans Social Media for Under-15s, Mandates Age Checks

The UAE Cabinet has set 15 as the minimum age to use social media and given TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and X up to 12 months to deploy verification systems that can prove how old their users are. Cabinet Resolution No. 106 of 2026, issued by the Cabinet chaired by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and reported on June 18, 2026, makes the UAE the first Arab nation to legislate a hard age floor for social media, with self-declared birthdays explicitly ruled out as proof.

Five Platforms Get 12 Months to Comply with Age Verification and Other Mandates or Face Blocking

The resolution names TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and X and places obligations on all five, from age verification to disabling targeted advertising aimed at minors, according to Gulf News and The National. Children under 15 are barred outright, while 15- and 16-year-olds may use the platforms only with enhanced protections built into their accounts.

Parental consent does not override the restriction. Platforms that miss the 12-month transition period face graduated enforcement that, per the resolution, can escalate to warnings, partial or full blocking, and administrative penalties. The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) may audit how each verification system works at any time.

Approved Age Verification Methods Range From Digital ID to AI Age Estimation

Article 4 sets out the verification methods platforms may use. They include government or official ID verification, such as a digital government identity, a scanned identity document, or an official document combined with biometric face matching; AI-based age estimation using biometric means; and licensed third-party verification providers approved to operate in the UAE.

The Child Digital Safety Council, on the TDRA’s recommendation, may approve further methods and standards. Whichever route a platform takes, the resolution requires high accuracy, data minimisation, non-discrimination, the ability to integrate with national age verification systems, and that biometric data and documents are not retained longer than the verification requires. The move aligns the UAE with a wider global push, following Australia’s under-16 ban and active age-assurance debates across the EU and UK.

Birthday Fields Were Always Easy to Bypass

For years, the default age gate on major platforms has been a self-reported date of birth, which any child can falsify in seconds. Resolution No. 106 closes that loophole by refusing to recognise self-declaration as valid, but it raises a harder engineering problem in its place. Platforms must now verify age to a high level of accuracy while collecting the minimum data, avoiding discrimination against any user group, and deleting biometric inputs promptly.

Meeting all of those conditions at once is difficult: aggressive document collection conflicts with data minimisation, and a system tuned only for accuracy can wrongly exclude legitimate users. Platforms also have to keep verification fast enough that adults are not driven away by friction.

Layered Age Assurance Closes the Accuracy-Privacy Gap

Platforms operating in the UAE now need age assurance that satisfies a regulator’s audit rather than a checkbox, balancing accuracy against the resolution’s strict privacy and non-discrimination requirements. That calls for a layered approach: document and digital-ID verification for users who can present credentials, biometric face-based age estimation for those who cannot, and a data pipeline that discards sensitive inputs once a check is complete.

Shufti’s age verification solution combines document verification with AI-driven facial age estimation across 230+ countries, returning a result in seconds while supporting data-minimisation controls suited to regimes like the UAE’s. Platforms weighing how to meet the 12-month deadline can explore Shufti’s age verification capabilities or request a demo to see the workflow in practice.