Lawmakers in Turkiye have begun debating a draft law that would restrict access to major social media platforms for children under the age of 15, reflecting a broader global push to regulate digital exposure among minors.

The proposed legislation would require platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram to prevent users below the age threshold from opening accounts. Companies would also be mandated to implement age-verification systems and provide parental control tools designed to regulate children’s online activity.

The bill forms part of a wider legislative package currently under consideration in parliament, though officials have not indicated how long deliberations are expected to continue. If adopted, the law would place new compliance obligations on both social media platforms and online gaming companies operating in the country.

The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has framed the proposal as a measure to address risks associated with children’s online engagement, including exposure to harmful content and threats to privacy. Mahinur Ozdemir Goktas, the minister for family and social services, has said the initiative prioritizes safeguarding minors from digital risks.

Under the draft, platforms would be required to respond swiftly to content deemed harmful and ensure that systems are in place to limit underage access. Online gaming companies would also need to appoint local representatives in Turkiye to ensure adherence to regulatory requirements. Enforcement mechanisms could include fines and reductions in internet bandwidth imposed by the national communications authority on companies that fail to comply.

The proposal has drawn criticism from opposition lawmakers, particularly the Republican People’s Party, who argue that restrictions alone are insufficient and advocate for policies grounded in children’s rights and digital education. Critics have also pointed to the broader context of internet governance in Turkiye, where authorities have previously imposed restrictions on online communication during periods of political tension.

In 2025, access to online platforms was curtailed during protests linked to the detention of Ekrem Imamoglu, highlighting concerns among rights groups about the potential overlap between child protection measures and broader controls on digital expression.

Turkiye’s proposal aligns with a growing international trend toward stricter regulation of minors’ access to social media. In Australia, restrictions introduced in December led to the removal of millions of accounts identified as belonging to users under 16. Similarly, Indonesia has begun enforcing rules banning children under 16 from accessing certain digital platforms associated with risks such as cyberbullying, online fraud, and harmful content.

European countries including Spain, France and the United Kingdom are also considering or implementing measures aimed at limiting children’s exposure to unregulated online environments, reflecting increasing scrutiny of the impact of social media on young users.

The Turkish legislation, if passed, would place the country among a growing group of governments seeking to impose age-based access controls on digital platforms, while also raising questions about enforcement, technological feasibility, and the balance between child protection and digital freedoms

Washington (AFP) — US tech giant Meta said Tuesday it had fixed a global outage affecting its messaging service WhatsApp after users around the world complained that they were unable to send or receive messages.

Russia has already banned Facebook for restricting access to Russian media while Instagram was blocked after Meta said it would allow social media users in Ukraine to post messages urging violence against Russian President Vladimir Putin and troops Moscow sent into Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The name change comes as the world’s largest social media company battles criticisms from lawmakers and regulators over its market power, algorithmic decisions and the policing of abuses on its platforms.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the company’s live-streamed virtual and augmented reality conference, said the new name reflected its ambitions to build the metaverse, rather than its namesake social media service.

The metaverse, a term first coined in a dystopian novel three decades ago and now attracting buzz in Silicon Valley, refers broadly to the idea of a shared virtual environment which can be accessed by people using different devices.

“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” said Zuckerberg.

The company, which has invested heavily in augmented and virtual reality, said the change would bring together its different apps and technologies under one new brand. It said it would not change its corporate structure.

The tech giant, which reports about 2.9 billion monthly users, has faced increasing scrutiny in recent years from global lawmakers and regulators.

In the latest controversy, whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaked documents which she said showed the company chose profit over user safety. Zuckerberg earlier this week said the documents were being used to paint a “false picture.”

The company said in a blog post that it intends to start trading under the new stock ticker it has reserved, MVRS, on Dec. 1. On Thursday, it unveiled a new sign at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, replacing its thumbs-up “Like” logo with a blue infinity shape.

Facebook shares were up more than 3% late on Thursday afternoon.

Facebook said this week that its hardware division Facebook Reality Labs, which is responsible for AR and VR efforts, would become a separate reporting unit and that its investment in it would reduce this year’s total operating profit by about $10 billion.

In an interview with tech publication the Information, Zuckerberg said he has not considered stepping down as CEO, and has not thought “very seriously yet” about spinning off this unit.

The division will now be called Reality Labs, its head Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said on Thursday. The company will also stop using the Oculus branding for its VR headsets, instead calling them “Meta” products.

This year, the company created a product team focused on the metaverse and it recently announced plans to hire 10,000 employees in Europe over the next five years to work on the effort.

The company has had multiple hits to its reputation over recent years, including over its handling of user data and its policing of abuses such as health misinformation, violent rhetoric and hate speech. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has also filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging anticompetitive practices.

“While it’ll help alleviate confusion by distinguishing Facebook’s parent company from its founding app, a name change doesn’t suddenly erase the systemic issues plaguing the company,” said Forrester Research Director Mike Proulx.

Zuckerberg said the new name, coming from the Greek word for “beyond,” symbolized there was always more to build. Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) CEO Jack Dorsey on Thursday tweeted out a different definition “referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.”

Zuckerberg said the new name also reflects that over time, users will not need to use Facebook to use the company’s other services.

Disinformation is an organised and carefully mined operation here.

BBC News published a featured column about the rise of disinformation campaigns in India, which has eventually become a difficult and tedious task for the social media giants like Facebook to handle.

Below is the entire column published verbatim:

The researcher’s report was part of a cache of internal documents called The Facebook Papers, recently obtained by New York Times and other US publications. They show the social media giant struggling to tame the avalanche of fake news, hate speech, and inflammatory content -“celebrations of violence”, among other things – out of India, the network’s biggest market.

This was made worse, reported the New York Times, by failure to deploy enough resources in India’s 22 officially recognised languages and a lack of cultural sensitivity.

A Facebook spokesperson told me that the findings had led the company to undertake a “deeper, more rigorous analysis” of its recommendation systems in India and contributed to “product changes to improve them”. 

So, is a lack of resources hobbling efforts by Facebook to fight fake news and inflammatory material in India? Facebook has partnered locally with 10 fact-checking organisations. Items flagged across the social network are fact-checked in English and 11 other Indian languages, making it one of the largest networks after the US.

But the reality is more complex. Fact-checking organisations working with Facebook in India say they cross-check and tag suspicious news and posts flagged by users. The network is then expected to suppress the distribution of such posts. 

“We really do not have any moral or legal authority on what Facebook does after we tag a news or a post,” a senior official of a fact-checking organisation told me.

Also, fact-checking is only one part of Facebook’s efforts at countering misinformation. The problem in India is much bigger: hate speech is rife, bots and fake accounts linked to India’s political parties and leaders abound, and user pages and large groups brim with inflammatory material targeting Muslims and other minorities. Disinformation is an organised and carefully mined operation here. Elections and “events” like natural calamities and the coronavirus pandemic usually trigger fake news outbreaks.

Also, the fact that Facebook does not fact check opinion and speech posted by politicians on grounds of “free expression and respect for the democratic process” is not always helpful. “A large part of the misinformation on social media in India is generated by politicians of the ruling party. They have the largest clout, but Facebook doesn’t fact-check them,” says Pratik Sinha, co-founder of Alt News, an independent fact-checking site.

So, the latest revelations do not come as a surprise to most fact-checkers and rights activists in India. “We have known this all along. No social media platform is above blame,” says Mr Sinha. 

With a surfeit of hate speech, trolling and attacks on minorities and women, Indian Twitter is a polarised and dark place. WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service, remains the largest carrier of fake news and hoaxes in its biggest market. YouTube, owned by Google, hosts a lot of fake news and controversial content, but doesn’t attract the same amount of attention. For example there were live videos, up to 12 hours long, on the site that fanned conspiracy theories about the death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput last year. (The police later ruled that Rajput died by suicide.)

The problem with Facebook lies elsewhere. With 340 million users, India is its biggest market. It is a general purpose social media platform which offers users individual pages and to form groups. “The wide range of features make it more vulnerable to all kinds of misinformation and hate speech,” says Mr Sinha. 

The overwhelming bulk of hate speech and misinformation on the social network are expected to be captured by its internal AI engines and content moderators all over the world. Facebook claims to have spent more than $13bn and hired more than 40,000 people in teams and technology around the world on safety and security issues since 2016. More than 15,000 people review content in more than 70 languages, including 20 Indian languages, a spokesperson told me. 

When users report hate speech, automated “classifiers” – a database created by humans which annotates different kinds of speeches – vet them before selected ones reach human moderators, which are often third-party contractors. “If these classifiers were good enough they would catch a lot more hate speech, with fewer false positives. But they clearly aren’t,” says Mr Sinha. 

A Facebook spokesperson told that the firm had “invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali”. 

“As a result, we’ve reduced the amount of hate speech that people see by half this year. Today, it’s down to 0.05%. Hate speech against marginalised groups, including Muslims, is on the rise globally. So we are improving enforcement and are committed to updating our policies as hate speech evolves online,” the spokesperson said. 

Then there are allegations that Facebook favours the governing party. A series of articles by journalists Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in 2018 wrote about the platform’s “dominant position in India with more than a little help from friends of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP”, among other things. (The articles also looked at the Congress party’s own “relations with Facebook”.) “A business model predicated on virality makes Facebook an ally of ruling governments,” says Mr Guha Thakurta, co-author of The Real Face of Facebook in India.

Many believe a large part of the blame must broadly lie with the social network’s algorithms which decide what to show up when you search for a subject, and pushes users to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages. 

Alan Rusbridger, a journalist and member of Facebook’s oversight board, has said the board will have to “get to grips” with the perception of people who believe that “the algorithms reward emotional content that polarises communities because that makes it more addictive”. In other words, the network’s algorithms allow “fringe content to reach the mainstream”, as Roddy Lindsay, a former data scientist at Facebook, says.

“This ensures that these feeds will continue promoting the most titillating, inflammatory content, and it creates an impossible task for content moderators, who struggle to police problematic viral content in hundreds of languages, countries and political contexts,” notes Mr Lindsay.

In the end, as Frances Haugen, the Facebook product-manager-turned-whistleblower, says: “We should have software that is human-scaled, where humans have conversations together, not computers facilitating who we get to hear from.”

Facebook (FB.O) and its top lobbying executive in India, Ankhi Das, are facing questions internally from employees over how political content is regulated in its biggest market, according to sources with direct knowledge and internal posts seen by Reuters.

The world’s largest social network is battling a public-relations and political crisis in India after the Wall Street Journal reported that Das opposed applying the company’s hate-speech rules to a politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party who had in posts called Muslims traitors.

In the United States and around the world, Facebook employees are raising questions about whether adequate procedures and content regulation practices were being followed by the India team, sources familiar with discussions told Reuters.

An open letter written to Facebook’s leadership by 11 employees on one internal platform, and seen by Reuters, demands company leaders acknowledge and denounce “anti-Muslim bigotry” and ensure more policy consistency.

The letter also demanded that Facebook’s “policy team in India (and elsewhere) includes diverse representation.”

“It is hard not to feel frustrated and saddened by the incidents reported … We know we’re not alone in this. Employees across the company are expressing similar sentiment,” said the letter. “The Muslim community at Facebook would like to hear from Facebook leadership on our asks.”

Facebook and Das did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook has been under fire in recent years for its lax approach to fake news content, state-backed disinformation campaigns and violent content spread via its platforms.

The WSJ article said Das had told staff that applying hate-speech rules to politicians close to Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “would damage the company’s business prospects in the country.”

Following the report, in response to Reuters queries on the matter, Facebook said it prohibits hate speech that incites violence and enforces policies without regard to political position or party affiliation.

“While we know there is more to do, we’re making progress on enforcement and conduct regular audits,” said the company, which has more than 300 million users in India.

One of the sources said Facebook’s India leadership will have to answer tough questions on what really happened, “There will be scrutiny on what really went down.”

A second source familiar with the reactions said Facebook employees were discussing whether there should be strict separation between government relations and content policy teams, and there is “an internal debate happening about the (content moderation) processes.”

After the article, Facebook India head Ajit Mohan defended Das, whose title is Director, Public Policy, India, South & Central Asia, and the company’s policies in an internal community post, also seen by Reuters.

The WSJ “article does not reflect the person I know or the extraordinarily complex issues we face everyday that benefits from Ankhi and the Public Policy team’s expertise,” Mohan wrote.

Mohan also wrote the company is “confident that the article’s claim that political affiliations influence decision making in India is inaccurate and without merit.”

A spokesman for the WSJ did not respond to a request for comment.

India’s opposition Congress Party has called for a parliamentary probe into Facebook, while BJP lawmakers in turn have accused Facebook of censoring nationalist voices.

Das, 49, is considered among India’s most influential corporate lobbying executives and has been central to Facebook’s rise in India since joining the company in 2011.

“She has created a niche for herself (in India),” said a person who has worked closely with Das on policy issues.

One former Facebook executive in Asia and a former Indian government official described Das as very sharp and politically connected. A second former employee said Das has always been outspoken about issues in the company.

Das hasn’t commented on the controversy, but her sister Rashmi, who has publicly acknowledged her own ties to a student wing close to the BJP, told the India Today TV on Tuesday, “we sisters are made of very stern stuff.”

“I’m sure Ankhi will handle it very competently,” she said.