Dutch plans to raise the European minimum age of social media to 15 were proposed by the three parties that have made up the new Dutch minority government, as plans to form the coalition were announced on Friday.

The Netherlands is the most recent nation to demand an effective social media ban at the age of 15, and the nation is following the lead of France. The three Dutch parties, namely the centrist D66, the Christian Democrat CDA, and, after all, the liberal VVD, will still have to find support towards their proposals since they only have 66 seats out of 150 in the Dutch parliament.

They write in the plans that the parties desire an enforced European minimum age of 15 on social media, privacy-friendly age verification of the youth, so long as social media is not safe enough. The present minimum age in the EU is 13.

Another aspect to be pursued by the coalition program is the crackdown on screen time by prevention and health guidance, and the implementation of stricter smartphone policies in schools, which will mean that the devices will have to stay at home or in a locker.

The latter was also part of the guidance that the previous Dutch government gave the parents last year in June to wait until they were 15 to give their children access to social media.

In the same week, the lower house in the French parliament passed a bill to prohibit social media for those under the age of 15, which may become enforced in September.

Australia led the pack by censoring a variety of platforms for children in December.

The new Dutch government is also initiating a push towards becoming more digitally sovereign, as well as reducing strategic dependencies in the fields of cloud services and data.