The Senate of the Democratic Republic of Congo accepted a bill on September 28 that would bar children under 13 from opening social media accounts or using platforms’ interactive social features at all. Sponsored by Senator Yvan Kazadi Kankonde, the bill amends the country’s Digital Code, Ordinance-Law No. 23/010 of March 2023, and builds in three tiers rather than a single cutoff. Under 13, no account and no interactive access. Between 13 and 15, a supervised account is allowed, but only with verifiable parental consent. From 15 onward, minors get independent access, paired with tighter obligations on platforms around security, privacy, advertising, default design choices and age verification itself.
Kankonde’s stated justification leans on specific, named harms, harassment, blackmail, exploitation of minors and exposure to age-inappropriate content, rather than a general anxiety about screen time. The debate in the Senate also pushed into territory beyond who gets to sign up at what age: how platforms collect personal data from young users, how automated recommendation systems steer them, and how often they’re algorithmically prompted back into the app. That matters because an age gate alone doesn’t touch any of that. A 15-year-old granted independent access under this bill would still be subject to whatever a platform’s recommendation engine decides to show them, which is presumably why the bill tries to regulate platform obligations alongside the age tiers rather than instead of them.
None of this is law yet. A declaration of admissibility sends the text to the Joint Committee on Legal Affairs, Infrastructure and Regional Planning for detailed study, and the committee can still reshape it before any final vote. The bill also didn’t come out of nowhere. In February 2026, President Félix Tshisekedi directed relevant ministries to propose measures promoting responsible social media use, including proportionate restrictions if needed, alongside a parallel push for digital literacy education and public awareness around social media and AI risks. Kankonde’s bill is the legislature’s answer to that directive, not a standalone initiative.
DRC is arriving relatively early to this fight by African standards, but not first. Gabon got there months earlier and went further: an ordinance adopted in late February 2026 and made public that April set the digital age of majority at 16, barred account creation below that age outright except with parental consent in specific cases, and gave Gabon’s communications regulator, the Haute Autorité de la Communication, power to enforce it, including strict 24-hour acknowledgment and 72-hour resolution windows for harmful content reports. Gabon folded that rule into a wider package of three ordinances that also cover influencers and AI use, suggesting a government treating online harms as one connected regulatory project rather than a series of one-off laws. Nigeria, by contrast, is still a step behind both. The Nigeria Data Protection Commission and the communications ministry have spent recent months running public consultations on a duty-of-care model and age-verification standards for platforms, but nothing has reached a bill, let alone a vote.
Lined up against each other, DRC’s proposed 13/15 split sits in the middle of Gabon’s flat 16-year line and Nigeria’s still-undefined approach, and all three face the same unresolved problem: nobody has fully explained how a platform is supposed to verify a user’s real age without collecting even more personal data about them than it already does. That tension, not the headline age number, is likely to be where DRC’s committee review actually gets tested in the coming months. A law that tells platforms to verify age is only as good as the verification method it allows, and that’s the detail still missing from every version of this rule on the continent so far.
