Opposition party GERB has proposed banning social media for anyone under 16, with a mandatory “digital wallet” app to verify every user’s age before they can even sign up. Miss the age cut and your account gets shut down, VPN or not. MP Kostadin Angelov is calling it protection from a “digital addiction.”
Starting with the obvious problem: it does not work. Australia banned social media for under-16s in December 2025, the most aggressive version of this idea anywhere in the world. Three months later a University of Newcastle study in the BMJ found more than 85% of under-16s were still using the platforms. Most never even hit an age check. The ones who did just typed in a fake birthday, daily use among 12 and 13 year olds barely moved. This is the “world first” GERB wants Bulgaria to copy.
What happens to the data? A mandatory app tied to your national ID, required to use basically any online service, is not a parenting tool, more like a surveillance system and Bulgaria would be building it from scratch, in a country whose institutions can barely keep a gas contract secret, let alone a national database of who is on Instagram. South Korea tried something similar in 2007, a real name verification system for major websites. It got struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2012 after a massive data breach exposed the identities of millions of users it was supposed to protect. We already got a small preview of this closer to home too, remember the EU’s own age verification app, hacked within hours of being unveiled.
Nobody is saying kids should get unlimited unsupervised access to Instagram at age 11. That’s a convo mostly between parents and their own kids. But “we built a mandatory ID system for the internet” and “we protected children” are not the same. This particular bill will probably go nowhere as the Bulgarian parliament has bigger fights to have, but that is exactly why it is worth mentioning now and not later. Every few months another country floats the same idea, an app, a wallet, a QR code, always for the children, always requiring you to prove who you are before you are allowed to do anything. One version fails, so the next one comes with fewer rough edges and less pushback. At some point “prove you are over 16” becomes “prove who you are” for everything you do online and we will support it, piece by piece, with everyone’s “best intentions”.
