Why is Romania different? Well-educated Western countries ban minors from social media while we tell them “that's not the way to go”

Despite the problems along the way, the Australian experiment, whereby teenagers under 16 no longer have access to social platforms, is moving forward. “We've started a national conversation about social media safety, and that's a good thing,” Canberra officials say. And now, many Western countries are copying their example. At the same time, Romania does not seem willing to “upset” social networks in any way.

One by one, Western countries are waking up to reality and understand that in an emergency situation, emergency measures must be applied. Spain announced on Tuesday that it is joining countries that ban minors under a certain age, generally between 14 and 16, from accessing social networks and forcing platforms to implement effective measures to verify the age of users.

Australia was the first country to implement such a ban, in December 2025, for people under 16, and other countries such as France, Denmark, Great Britain, Austria are now trying to follow suit. For its part, the European Parliament recommended since November that member countries set a minimum age of 16 for access to social networks, due to “deep concerns about the risks to the physical and mental health of minors”.

However, in Romania, the only European country that had to cancel its elections due to misinformation on social media, any discussion about the regulation of these platforms is cut off from the start, with arguments like “bans are not good in principle”, “education is the solution”, why bother with the rules, because they are violated anyway”.

“We also ban drugs, but that doesn't mean we don't have this phenomenon,” said, for example, the presidential adviser on education, Sorin Costreie.

Discussions resurfaced in Romania after the case in Cenei (Timiș), where a 15-year-old child was killed by two other children, 13 and 15 years old.

Predoiu fears “an Orwellian world”

Secretary of State Raed Arafat told Digi24 on Saturday that, in his opinion, “we have reached the 12th hour and that the lack of measures would have a serious social impact on future generations.” Children are manipulated on social networks, their mental health is affected, they have behavioral problems, Arafat said.

However, he was immediately contradicted by the Minister of the Interior, Cătălin Predoiu.

“If we start punishing anything that does not suit us ideologically or politically, we are entering a dangerous road that leads directly to an Orwellian world,” the minister wrote on Facebook (where else?).

By the way, the Home Secretary did not have the same fear that he was living in an “Orwellian world” when the police went to the home of a citizen who had written ironic messages about him on Facebook. Not even when a journalist was wanted by the same police, after urging on the Internet to vote for “an honest candidate” at Bucharest City Hall.

Predoiu also said that “banning access to networks does not prepare children for reality, but makes them more vulnerable”.

“A system of bans could lead to mass surveillance and raise problems for democracy,” the official added.

And what would be the solution? “A solid social education, combined with supervision (by parents and teachers) and communication,” explained Predoiu.

Some experiences with teachers from Romania

The first observation is that to speak of education as the solution to an urgent problem is like telling people who now have nothing to eat that at some point humanity will be so advanced that no man will suffer from hunger. Thanks for the encouragement, but what do I put on the table now?

The second observation is that exactly the countries with a more developed education system, incomparably more advanced than the one in Romania, are starting to adopt restrictive measures against social networks.

And if it was still about education, I would like to tell about some interactions I had with students and teachers from high schools in Romania, while, at the invitation of colleagues from Veridica.ro, I gave some presentations about fake news, disinformation, how to protect ourselves from videos and photos taken with AI.

“I think it would be more useful to talk about these topics to teachers and parents,” one of the teachers attending the presentation told us at one point. At first I didn't understand what he meant, but we caught up later, in another high school.

While my colleague was explaining to the students some rules by which they will be able to realize, using geometry, that a photo on the Internet is not real, but produced with Artificial Intelligence, the teacher, who was listening to us quite skeptically, said: “okay, but there are exceptions, I suppose.”

“No, ma'am, geometry has no exceptions, that's why it's called an 'exact science.'

Of course, it would be unfair to generalize. I met in this project enough trained teachers and many students willing to learn. From what I found, for many teenagers in Romania, social networks are exactly what they should be: entertainment platforms. But for others, perhaps just as many, no.

In fact, in reality, the situation is so bad on social media that we simply do not have time to wait for future generations to know for themselves which image is real and which is fake, to understand that social media algorithms keep them captive in certain topics and create a false impression of the world they live in and so on.

And yet what do we do if we ban teenagers from social networks?

To answer, we should look at what is happening in Australia, where from December 11, 2025, people under the age of 16 no longer have access to Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube (Discord, Roblox, Youtube Kids were exempted)

4.7 million accounts have been disabled since the law came into effect. And, yes, what many say will happen in Romania as well, if a similar restriction were to be adopted, is happening: many teenagers cheat the system and continue to stay on social networks.

How do I do this? Simple enough. As the most widespread method of age verification implemented by social platforms is based on facial recognition, many have reported using, for example, the face of their older sister or older brother.

“Some even put on fake mustaches and managed to trick the system,” says one Australian mother.

“But ultimately it's the industry's responsibility to better protect itself,” says Julie Inman Grant, head of eSafety, Australia's online safety agency. All of these “fence jumping” have already been reported to the platforms and they are expected to take action.

What else happened? Many teenagers cited the fact that without social media accounts, they began to feel marginalized, disconnected from their friends. These are real problems, which the Australian authorities do not deny. But an argument invoked by Inman Grant seems to me very important to say in the debates that should take place in Romania:

“This ban started a conversation. It started a national conversation about social media safety, and that's a good thing.”

Perhaps paradoxically for those who argue that it is better to educate in schools than to enforce bans, it is the fact that cyber safety is already being studied in Australian schools.

“But this stuff doesn't necessarily cover what you need to know to be safe on social media — like understanding algorithms, echo chambers, sponsored content,” says online safety researcher Joanne Orlando.

And I would say one more thing about the Australian example: 4 out of 5 adults said they supported the ban, according to a poll conducted by Monash University in December (only 15% opposed).

Romania already has a Digital Majority Law in Parliament, which stipulates that a teenager under the age of 16 needs parental consent to create an account on a social platform. The normative act is to reach the Chamber of Deputies. But be careful: “parental consent” does not mean “ban” at all.

Probably, in the classic Romanian style, we try to be in the middle. From the mouth of the West, we make a law, but we are not convinced that it is useful to us, so we make it useless (or too weak). And yet, a question remains for the decision-makers in Bucharest: why don't we see the danger that others saw?

What makes us different?

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