Will Egypt be Africa’s first country to ban social media for children?

inside: Lusophone Africa walk towards a data pact

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CybAfrique Media
February 07, 2026

CybAfriqué is a space for news and analysis on cyber, data, and information security on the African continent.

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Will Egypt be Africa’s first country to ban social media for children?

It is a short story. Over the past decade, the experience of being a teenager has shifted from questionable fashion choices and cigarette breaks to constant negotiation with digital life and its psychological costs. Several studies now link heavy social media use to the development of persistent facial tic in children.  Children are losing money to crypto-gurus, being groomed, and being bullied. And definitely, sad goth isn’t healthy, right???

Sometimes in 2024, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas did something not many people do anymore. He read a book by Jonathan Haidt and thought, “Hmm, social media is actually harmful to kids. What if we ban it?”

That moment ushered in an era where children's access to phones and social media has become the subject of serious parliamentary debate and policies. Last December, Australia was the first country to ban social media for kids under 16 after a year of buildup. Of course, African countries like South Africa and Senegal have played with the idea. In 2023, Kenya barely avoided a total ban on TikTok due to concerns of "eroding cultural values" and a lack of effective age verification.

Late last month, Egypt’s parliament announced its intention to ban social media for children. Earlier this week, citing concerns over child safety, the country banned Roblox, an online game platform and game creation system. It marked the first time an African country removed a major platform explicitly on child protection grounds.

The actual reasons for the Roblox ban are, as always, a mix of genuine panic and political theatre. Senator Walaa Hermas Radwan, who championed the move, pointed to "predatory strangers" and "psychological risks." In a country with a long history of crackdown on social media use and “immoral content”, child protection can be argued as shorthand for "content we can't moderate in real-time." Roblox is a decentralised ecosystem of millions of user-generated worlds. 

Does it work? In Australia, reports say the ban has already turned 14-year-olds into junior network engineers. The real infosec tragedy here is a data conundrum. To enforce a ban, you need age verification, which typically occurs in one of three ways: government IDs (which platforms shouldn't have), biometric face scans (which platforms really shouldn't have and don’t work as intended anyway), and third-party "age assurance" vendors (who are honeypots for hackers).

During the Discord breach in late 2025, over 70,000 Australian IDs collected specifically for age checks were leaked. If the world does agree that it is ethical to ban social media for kids, a global consensus might look like "Attribute-Based Credentials”, where a phone can verify age without revealing personal identity, might become the norm.

For now, no African country has implemented a full social media ban for children, not even Egypt. But given the way the blocky avatars of Roblox just disappeared, they might be the first to pull the plug.

Lusophone African countries walk towards a data pact

There are many ways to classify a law, one of which is jurisdiction. If it is a domestic statute, the kind of laws drafted and passed within a country to satisfy local voters (or local despots), or transnational, a law engineered as a result of cross-border cooperation between various countries trying to say the same thing.

Each class comes with its own characteristics, but the consensus is that international regulatory frameworks tend either to struggle significantly or succeed at scale, especially when it comes to data regulations. The GDPR remains the global gold standard, frequently copied and often poorly implemented. Many will describe the African Union’s Malabo Convention as having not met its potential, despite finally entering into force in 2023.

The first unitary data law, the GDPR, set the pace in 2016. In Africa, we had the Malabo Convention as early as 2014, but it sat in a drawer for nearly a decade waiting for enough countries to care. While it waited, regional blocs decided they couldn’t wait for the whole continent to agree on what a "cookie" is or isn’t. 

According to UNESCO, Lusophone African countries, the Portuguese-speaking bloc, might be working towards a unitary law in the long term. This came to light in a late 2025 workshop where Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Mozambique gathered to strengthen data policy. 

Is a unitary law that specifically governs only Lusophone African countries needed? Will it make any difference? We’ve seen this before. ECOWAS did it in 2010 with its Supplementary Act on Personal Data Protection, which forced West African countries to get their acts together. It worked mostly because it gave countries like Nigeria and Ghana a template to follow.

However, the conditions here are unique. Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe already have their own dedicated data laws. Mozambique, however, operated a patchwork of constitutional privacy rights without a dedicated Data Protection Authority (DPA) until very recently. Angola might also need to loosen rigid domestic controls to allow for easier data flow with its neighbours.

We do not envy anyone working in compliance. You now have to navigate the Malabo Convention (Continental), the ECOWAS Act (Regional), and potentially this new Lusophone Unitary Guidance. It sounds like a nightmare, but redundancy is a feature, not a bug. These layers of regulation act like "defence in depth" for your data. One law might be weak on AI ethics, while the other is specifically designed to handle the "backbone of AI."

But no African country has successfully synchronised all these layers yet. Much of the continent remains stuck in a drafting phase, heavy on policy ambition, light on consistent enforcement.

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