Bulgaria

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-06

The EU's Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), transposed at the EU level in this corpus, sets the baseline for protecting minors from harmful audiovisual content and for age verification on video-sharing platforms.

Bulgaria's own Radio and Television Act (Zakon za radioto i televiziyata, ZRT) carries the national transposition: Article 17a bars a media service provider from creating or distributing programs that could harm a child's physical, psychological, moral or social development, and requires the Council for Electronic Media (Savet za elektronni medii, SEM) to adopt a Code of Conduct with providers, including BNT and BNR, prescribing measures such as scheduling, age-verification tools, and encoding.

Article 19d, added for video-sharing platforms, requires a platform provider to take appropriate measures including age-verification systems for content that could harm a child's development, alongside flagging mechanisms, parental-control systems, and media-literacy tools. A violation of Article 17a(1) by a media service provider carries an administrative property sanction of BGN 15,000 to 30,000, doubled on repetition.

No adult-content age-verification statute distinct from this children's-protection regime, no social-media-specific minor-access restriction, and no app-store age-verification duty exist in Bulgarian law as of the date below.