France Approves Social Media Ban for Children Under 15

Parliament gives final approval to a landmark law that will block under-15s from opening new social media accounts by September, making France the first country in the European Union to enact a nationwide platform ban for minors.

A social media ban for children under 15 has cleared its final parliamentary hurdle in France, with both the National Assembly and the Senate voting Tuesday to adopt a compromise text that will bar minors under that age from opening accounts on platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. The vote caps a turbulent seven-month legislative journey that began with the National Assembly’s first approval in January and nearly collapsed this month after the European Commission flagged concerns that an earlier draft clashed with EU digital law. President Emmanuel Macron, who has championed the measure as one of the signature achievements of his final term in office, is expected to sign the bill into law within days, with enforcement scheduled to begin at the start of the new school year in September.

What the New Law Actually Bans

The legislation bars anyone under 15 from creating an account on major social networking platforms, and instructs France’s Information Technology minister to draw up an official list of the services covered by the restriction. Rather than adopting the Senate’s original idea of a narrower blacklist with parental-consent exceptions for other platforms, the reconciled text opts for a blanket prohibition on social networks for the age group, a shift lawmakers made partly to sidestep concerns raised in Brussels. The bill also bans mobile phone use inside high schools, extending an earlier restriction that already applied to primary and middle schools nationwide.

How France’s Social Media Ban for Children Under 15 Will Work

Under the text adopted Tuesday, the rollout happens in two stages. Starting September 1, platforms covered by the eventual ministerial list will be required to stop under-15s from creating new accounts. A second phase, beginning in January 2027, extends the restriction to existing accounts, effectively forcing platforms to identify and remove underage users who signed up before the law took effect. Platforms will be obligated to deploy age-verification systems that have been vetted and approved by France’s independent privacy regulator, a requirement designed to prevent companies from relying on easily bypassed self-declared birth dates.

Why Macron Made This a Flagship Policy

Macron has personally driven the bill’s fast-track journey through Parliament, framing it as a defining policy of his presidency even as he governs a weakened, divided National Assembly following the political turmoil unleashed by his 2024 decision to dissolve parliament. He has repeatedly linked heavy platform use among adolescents to declining mental health and, at times, to youth violence, casting the restriction as a matter of protecting a generation’s attention and development from commercial algorithms designed to maximize engagement.

The Science Behind the Crackdown

French lawmakers built their case on warnings from the country’s public health watchdog, which last year concluded that platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram were detrimental to adolescents, particularly girls, though it stopped short of naming social media as the sole driver of worsening youth mental health. The agency found that roughly one in two French teenagers spends between two and five hours a day on a smartphone. Supporters of the bill also cited broader findings linking heavy platform use to reduced self-esteem and greater exposure to content associated with self-harm, disordered eating and drug use. Several French families have separately sued TikTok, alleging the platform’s design contributed to their children’s suicides.

Brussels, Age Verification and the EU Hurdle

The bill’s path was not smooth. The European Commission flagged the earlier Senate-favored blacklist approach as potentially incompatible with the bloc’s Digital Services Act, forcing negotiators back to the table just days before the scheduled vote. Centrist Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly, who steered the bill through the upper house, said the blacklist model would have required fresh consultations with Brussels and carried a lingering risk of non-compliance with European law, tipping the balance toward a simpler, blanket restriction instead. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has separately urged EU-wide limits on children’s social media use, comparing platform design to unsafe consumer products and arguing that companies, not families, bear responsibility for making their services safe for young users.

How France Compares to Australia and the Rest of the World

France now joins a fast-growing group of roughly twenty countries that have proposed or introduced minimum age limits for social media, but it becomes the first EU member state to pass a nationwide, blanket ban rather than narrower content or advertising rules. Australia was first globally, switching on an under-16 ban in December that covers Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube; early evaluations there have already shown how age-verification checks can be circumvented by tech-savvy teenagers. Britain has said it is weighing comparable restrictions, and Turkey and Indonesia have introduced their own age limits for younger users, underscoring a broader global shift toward treating unrestricted platform access for children as a policy failure rather than a personal choice.

Criticism and Pushback in Parliament

Support for the bill has been unusually broad for a fractured legislature, but it has not been unanimous. Lawmakers on the hard left voted against the measure, arguing that elements of the law amount to government overreach into family decision-making and warning that mandatory age verification could pressure platforms into collecting more identifying data on all users, not just minors. Digital rights advocates have raised similar concerns about privacy trade-offs, even as they broadly support limiting harm to children online.

What Happens Next

With both chambers now having adopted the same text, the bill heads to Macron for his signature, a formality given his vocal support. Attention will then shift to the Information Technology ministry, which must publish the list of platforms subject to the ban well before the September 1 start date, and to the privacy regulator, which will need to certify age-verification tools that platforms can deploy at scale. How rigorously companies enforce the new accounts rule this fall, and how the harder test of removing existing underage accounts unfolds from January 2027, will determine whether France’s approach becomes a model for the rest of the European Union or a cautionary tale about the limits of age-gating technology.

Timeline: How the Ban Came Together

For more on the European Commission’s concerns over the bill’s compatibility with EU law, see CNN’s coverage of the final vote.