Companies operating social media services in the UAE can no longer harvest a child’s browsing behaviour to fuel advertising or other commercial activity, one of several prohibitions contained in a Cabinet resolution that fixes 15 as the threshold age for using these platforms.
The measure draws a sharp line for the youngest users. Anyone below 15 is barred from opening or running a personal account, and is shut out of the platforms’ full range of features. A narrow window opens for 15- and 16-year-olds, who may be granted access only under tightened conditions: content filtered by age, limits on whom they can interact with, caps on screen time, and parental control tools layered onto their accounts.
A point the government stressed is that a parent’s blessing carries no weight against these limits. Permission granted at home cannot be used as a workaround, meaning the prohibitions hold regardless of what a guardian decides.
The rules reach broadly. Any platform letting people set up profiles, talk to one another, post or circulate material, or lean on algorithms to sort and push content falls within scope, whether the service charges a fee or not. Reach into the UAE market, or aim at users inside the country, and the resolution applies.
Verifying age accurately becomes a platform obligation, as does spotting accounts that break the rules and acting on them without delay. Operators are given a runway of up to a year to phase everything in, coordinating with authorities so the technical and regulatory pieces are in place before enforcement bites.
Responsibility does not rest solely with the platforms. Caregivers are told to keep watch over what their children do online within the permitted bounds and to instil habits of safe, responsible use. The resolution pairs that duty with a defined framework and hands-on tools meant to steer young users toward more deliberate digital behaviour.
Enforcement is parcelled out among several bodies. The National Media Authority and the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority each police compliance within their own remit, armed with escalating responses to violations, from a warning through to partial or total blocking of a platform, or administrative penalties. Sitting alongside them, the Child Digital Safety Council is tasked with weighing the risks tied to children’s platform use and proposing fixes in concert with federal and local authorities.
The resolution slots into a wider body of law spanning child rights, cybercrime, data protection, and media regulation, knitting these strands into a single approach to safeguarding children online.
