The Arab World & digital safety: A legal landscape

A landmark verdict in the United States: A federal court held Google and Meta legally accountable for the addictive design of their platforms, finding that the architecture of these apps, built deliberately to maximize engagement at all costs, had caused measurable psychological harm to young users. It was the kind of ruling that reverberates far beyond American courtrooms. Across the world, governments began asking themselves the same uncomfortable question: what are we doing to protect our children?

In Lebanon, the honest answer is: very little.

The Arab world moves

The picture across Arab states is uneven, but the direction of travel is clear: something is changing, and Lebanon is being left behind.

Lebanon has no dedicated legislation addressing social media's psychological harm to minors. No age verification requirements. No algorithmic transparency obligations. No enforceable restrictions on how platforms collect and exploit children's data. A child in Beirut can download any app, be fed an endless stream of algorithmically curated content optimized for addiction, and the Lebanese state has no specific legal framework to intervene.

What makes it more striking is what is happening just across the region.

The UAE has set the regional benchmark. In 2025, it enacted Federal Decree-Law No. 26 on Child Digital Safety, one of the most comprehensive child protection frameworks in the world, which came into force on January 1, 2026. The law defines a child as anyone under 18, establishes a dedicated Child Digital Safety Council chaired by the Minister of Family, and places sweeping obligations on digital platforms operating in or targeting users in the UAE. Crucially, it has extraterritorial reach: if a platform can be accessed by users in the UAE, it falls within the law's scope. Non-compliance can result in services being suspended or blocked entirely.

The details are granular and serious. Platforms are prohibited from collecting or processing the personal data of children under 13. Privacy-by-default is a baseline requirement. Targeted advertising directed at minors is banned. Verifiable parental consent is mandatory.

Egypt has been the most publicly vocal, even if its legislation has not yet caught up with its rhetoric. President El-Sisi has urged lawmakers to restrict children's social media access "until they reach an age when they can handle it properly," and parliament has pledged to tackle what it called the "digital chaos" damaging the country's youth. In 2026, Egypt issued guidelines banning the online bullying, exploitation, and blackmail of children, with penalties for non-compliant platforms. Guidelines are not law, but the political will is visible and growing.

Saudi Arabia, characteristically, presents a more complicated picture. Its Child Protection Law has been invoked to shield young people from exploitation as online influencers, specifically protecting children from being used for commercial marketing in ways that cause psychological stress. On the international stage, Riyadh pushed through a unanimous UN Human Rights Council resolution in July 2025 on child protection in cyberspace. Yet the same cybercrime legislation cited for protection has also been used to prosecute minors for online speech, a contradiction that human rights organizations have not let pass quietly.

Kuwait sits somewhere in the middle: providers targeting minors must obtain parental consent for data collection, and a dedicated cybercrime enforcement department exists within the Ministry of Interior.

The core problem: Enforcement

Even where laws exist, the gap between legislation and real-world protection remains a serious concern. Age verification mechanisms are largely unimplemented. Platforms operate without meaningful local oversight. And as experts note, the most significant risks to young users arise from engagement-maximizing recommender systems designed to capture attention at all costs, regulation should require transparency around how these systems operate, restrict predatory algorithmic feeds for minors, and mandate safer defaults.

The cost of waiting

Lebanon's children are not insulated from these harms by the country's legislative inaction, they are simply unprotected from them. In a society already marked by trauma, economic precarity, and fractured institutions, the mental health consequences of unregulated social media use among young people are not abstract. They are playing out in schools, in clinics, in homes. The US verdict against Google and Meta has made one thing unmistakably clear: the argument that platforms bear no responsibility for what their design does to the youth has collapsed in a court of law. The question now is whether anyone in Lebanon is paying attention.