Dutch government says kids under age 15 should not use social media
The country's health ministry also encouraged parents to limit how long their children spend using electronic devices, keep phones and laptops out of bedrooms, and have 20 minutes of screen time followed by two hours of outside play.
The advisory 'gives children the time to further develop digital resilience and media literacy,' Vincent Karremans, caretaker deputy minister for youth and sport in the Netherlands, said in a letter to parliament.
Karremans is one of several ministers who remained on after the Dutch government collapsed earlier this month pending October elections.
Both TikTok and Instagram require users to be at least 13 years of age.
The guidelines, which are not legally binding, distinguish between 'social media' sites like TikTok and Instagram and 'social interaction platforms' such as messaging services WhatsApp and Signal.
The social media sites have 'significantly more addictive design features' that have a negative impact on children, the government said.
Children can use the messaging services from age 13, the year most Dutch children start secondary school, according to the recommendations.
Last year, Australia became the first country in the world to ban children under 16 from using social media. Denmark and France are considering similar legislation, and Sweden issued recommendations about limiting screen time for children last year.
A group of experts, put together at the request of the Dutch parliament, found that intense screen time and social media usage can result in physical and psychological problems in children.
Dutch schools have banned students from using tablets, cell phones, and smart watches, with some exceptions, such as classes on media literacy.
In May, some 1,400 doctors and child welfare experts in the Netherlands signed a public letter, calling on the government to ban children under 14 from having cell phones and restricting social media usage until age 16.
In February, Dutch Queen Máxima said that her youngest daughter, Princess Ariane, had eyesight problems from spending too much time on mobile devices.
Iranian state television urged people to remove WhatsApp from their smartphones, alleging without specific evidence that the messaging app gathered user information to send to Israel.
In a statement to the Associated Press,** WhatsApp said it was 'concerned these false reports will be an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need them the most.'
WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, meaning messages are scrambled so that only the sender and recipient can see them. If someone else tries to access these messages all they will see is a distorted message that can't be unscrambled without a key.
'We do not track your precise location, we don't keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the personal messages people are sending one another,' the statement added. 'We do not provide bulk information to any government'.
WhatsApp is owned by Meta, the US-based parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The app had been one of the most popular messaging apps aside from Instagram and Telegram.
This wouldn't be the first time that Iran has asked people to limit their use of WhatsApp. In 2022, the country banned WhatsApp during mass protests against the government over the death of a woman held by the country's morality police.
Cybersecurity expert Gregory Falco said it's been demonstrated that it's possible to understand metadata about WhatsApp that does not get encrypted.
'So you can understand things about how people are using the app and that's been a consistent issue where people have not been interested in engaging with WhatsApp for that (reason),' he said.
Another issue is data sovereignty, Falco added, where data centres hosting WhatsApp data from a certain country are not necessarily located in that country. It's more than feasible, for instance, that WhatsApp's data from Iran is not hosted in Iran.
'Countries need to house their data in-country and process the data in-country with their own algorithms. Because it's really hard increasingly to trust the global network of data infrastructure,' he said.
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