UAE Decree Bans Social Media Accounts For Children Under 15, Requires Age Verification

Al Jazeera’s Naya Hejazi said the latest data shows people spend an average of 40 days a year online, framing the question “How much of your life do you spend on social media?” for World Social Media Day.

“Toggle Play How much of your life do you spend on social media”

Al Jazeera

In the United Arab Emirates, a government decree imposed a minimum age of 15 for using social media, making it the first Arab country to impose such a restriction.

Al Jazeera

The UAE rules prohibit children under 15 from creating personal accounts on social media or operating them, and require social media apps operating in the region to implement stricter age-verification mechanisms.

The UAE government also stressed that apps must use digital identity verification tools and AI techniques to confirm a user’s age, and companies have been given a 12-month deadline to comply with the new regulations.

A Washington Post account of global scammers described instructions to “make each victim fall in love” and said Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, who was trafficked to a scam center inMyanmar, impersonated a 28-year-old Singaporean woman named Ella.

The article said that on a typical shift, Koorimannil “chatted with more than 100 people across dozens of profiles at the same time,” while supervisors prowled among desks with electric batons.

Al-Jarida ash-Sharq

The Washington Post said “Technology from American companies is being used to power a revolution in the scam industry,” describing how it industrializes and globalizes fraud.

The same report tied the scam operation to the use of US tech while presenting Koorimannil’s testimony about the pace and scale of online impersonation.

A separate Al Jazeera-linked report from مركز المستقبل said Kazakhstan announced in June that it is studying banning the registration of children under 16 on social media, and that Tajikistan’s parliament member proposed a similar initiative for children under 14 in early October 2025.

The same source said Kyrgyzstan banned the TikTok app in April 2024 over concerns about children's safety and welfare, placing the Central Asian steps in a broader trend toward restricting children’s access to platforms.

In the UAE rules, the report said platforms must deactivate accounts of children under 15 and stop using children's personal data in targeted ads, while also preventing attempts to circumvent age-verification systems.

Meanwhile, the Alayam site’s block message described a security service that triggered a “block” and listed “Cloudflare Ray ID” and an “IP” as part of what a user could do to resolve the access issue.