Lithuania

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-07

Lithuania's general child-protection information statute, the Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information (Nepilnamečių apsaugos nuo neigiamo viešosios informacijos poveikio įstatymas, No. IX-1067), classifies public information that has a negative effect on minors, erotic content among the enumerated categories, and requires anyone creating or disseminating such information to restrict minors' access to it through time-of-day and place segregation, content-rating indices, or technical measures capable of verifying a user's age, and separately obliges any provider of public computer-network (internet) access to install content-filtering measures approved by the Communications Regulatory Authority (RRT).

A 18 December 2024 Constitutional Court ruling struck down the Act's separate discriminatory-content category (Art. 4(2)(12)) as unconstitutional; the erotic-content category this instrument rests on is unaffected.

Lithuania's Law on the Provision of Information to the Public (No. I-1418), which as amended transposes the Audiovisual Media Services Directive's video-sharing-platform duties toward minors already recorded at the EU level (Directive 2010/13/EU Arts. 6a and 28b, as amended), was not reached in this review. No social-media-specific minor-access statute, app-store age-verification statute, or age-appropriate design code distinct from this general regime has been identified.

01

Instruments on record

Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information, Arts. 4 and 7 (Content Classification and Age-Restricted Access)

In force

Nepilnamečių apsaugos nuo neigiamo viešosios informacijos poveikio įstatymas (Nr. IX-1067) 4 ir 7 str.

Effective 2021-02-01 · Applies to both

Article 4 classifies public information causing a negative effect on minors' mental or physical health or their physical, mental, spiritual or moral development. Content of an erotic nature is one of 21 enumerated categories the article lists, alongside violence, gambling promotion, self-harm, and other harmful subject matter.

The restrictions, exceptions and prohibitions this Law sets apply to all public information, including advertising, commercial audiovisual messages, trailers, trademarks, user-generated video, and public events.

Article 7 bars disseminating such information directly to minors and confines it to places minors cannot access or times they would not be using it, unless the discloser instead uses technical measures that let a person responsible for a child's upbringing control the child's exposure, among them tools intended to verify a user's age, parental-control tools, or content-filtering systems.

Content still reaching a general audience without such technical measures must instead carry an index and observe a broadcast-time band.

Index 'S' runs from 23:00 to 06:00, index 'N-14' runs from 21:00 to 06:00 for content harmful to under-14s, and index 'N-7' applies at any time for content harmful to under-7s. A provider of public computer-network (internet) access must install and operate content-filtering measures the Communications Regulatory Authority (Ryšių reguliavimo tarnyba, RRT) approves, and RRT itself supervises that duty's implementation.

A computer game's producer or distributor must separately label the game by a user age threshold under Government-set procedure. Supervision of the Law's implementation generally rests with the Inspector (Žurnalistų etikos inspektorius, the Office of the Inspector of Journalist Ethics). The Inspector may open administrative-offense proceedings under the Code of Administrative Offenses and impose an administrative penalty against a violator.

Age threshold18
Enforcement bodyInspector (Žurnalistų etikos inspektorius, the Office of the Inspector of Journalist Ethics) for the general regime, and the Communications Regulatory Authority (RRT) for the internet-access-provider filtering duty.

Source: Full text of law