France Bans Social Media for Under-15s as a New EU Ruling Clears the Way

France will bar every child under 15 from opening new social media accounts starting September 1. The Senate gave final approval this week, making France the first European Union country to write a blanket ban into law. Existing underage accounts get a reprieve only until December 31, when platforms must shut those down too.

The vote looks like a triumph five years in the making. It only became legally possible after a European court reversed, in June, the exact reasoning that killed France’s last attempt at the same idea.

Four Months to Prove You Are Old Enough

The law targets services built around open social interaction, the kind of definition regulators elsewhere have used to sweep in Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. Anyone found running an account while under 15 faces closure once a platform confirms their age.

For four months, all of us in France will have to prove our age.

Anne Le Henanff, France’s digital minister, said the September 1 start date was realistic “because age-verification tools already exist,” with more still in development. She said the burden falls on platforms, not families. “If someone is under 15, the account will be closed,” she said.

Gabriel Attal, the former prime minister who steered the bill through the National Assembly, said platforms would then have until December 31 to deactivate accounts that fail the check. The lower house passed the measure by a lopsided 130 to 21 vote in January. The Senate, where centrist Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly guided the bill through committee, gave its own approval almost six months later.

Macron called the vote “a major step forward” in a video posted online. “France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers,” he said. The same law bans mobile phones inside high schools, timed to start with the new school year. Middle schools and elementary schools have enforced a similar phone ban since 2018.

The Ban France Already Tried Once

This is not France’s first attempt. On July 7, 2023, lawmakers passed a law establishing “digital majority,” requiring parental consent before anyone under 15 could open a social media account.

It was never enforced. France notified Brussels under the EU’s technical regulation process. The European Commission found Paris had mishandled that notification. Separately, it said the rule clashed with the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s rulebook against member states piling extra obligations onto platforms already regulated elsewhere in the bloc. Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner at the time, wrote to Paris and demanded France repeal the never-enforced provisions and start over.

The timing made it worse. Weeks earlier, the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), had ruled against a similar Austrian law written to fight online hate. It used the same legal theory Brussels was now raising against Paris: one member state cannot pile extra rules onto platforms licensed elsewhere in the bloc.

France kept building anyway. A separate law adopted in May 2024, covering securing and regulating the digital space, gave ARCOM, France’s audiovisual and digital regulator, sharper teeth against pornography sites specifically, even as the social media consent rule sat frozen.

Macron grew impatient waiting on the older fight. After a fatal stabbing by a 14-year-old at a middle school in Nogent, in the Haute-Marne region, he told France 2 television, “I’m giving us a few months to get European support,” warning he would push ahead in France alone if Brussels did not move fast enough. That impatience produced the bill his government drafted in January 2026, timed to reach a September start, months after Australia’s own under-16 ban had taken effect in December.

Five Years, One Reversed Verdict

The legal fight is easier to follow in order.

1. July 2023: France adopts the digital majority law requiring parental consent for under-15 social media accounts.
2. October 2023: The European Commission issues a detailed opinion saying the law conflicts with the DSA’s bar on one country regulating platforms licensed elsewhere in the bloc.
3. November 2023: The CJEU rules against a similar Austrian law on the same legal grounds, hardening Brussels’ position.
4. 2024: Commissioner Thierry Breton tells Paris to repeal the consent rule and start over. It never gets enforced.
5. September 18, 2025: Advocate General Szpunar recommends the CJEU let France impose age checks on platforms based elsewhere in the EU to protect minors.
6. June 16, 2026: The CJEU’s Grand Chamber agrees, ruling that protecting children can justify overriding the country-of-origin principle.
7. July 21, 2026: The French Senate gives final approval to the new under-15 social media ban, five weeks after the ruling.

The June ruling did not touch social media directly. It settled a separate, older case over French rules ordering foreign-based pornography sites to check users’ ages. Czech-registered operators had challenged the requirement, and the Conseil d’État referred the question to Luxembourg in 2024. The Grand Chamber’s fifteen judges ruled that protecting minors can override that principle, though it sent some technical conditions back to French courts to confirm.

Paris had already flexed that muscle domestically. The Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, separately upheld an order requiring user age verification against five EU-based sites, which ARCOM can block or delist within 48 hours of a formal notice.

That legal foothold does not guarantee the social media law survives a fresh challenge, but it is one Paris lacked in 2023. Lawmakers also redesigned the bill to lower that risk. An early plan to build a formal blacklist of banned platforms was dropped, Morin-Desailly said, because it would have required fresh consultations with the European Commission and carried a “small risk” of breaching EU law.

How France, Australia and the UK Draw the Line

France is not writing on a blank page. Two other democracies picked different tools for the same worry.

The French model sits closest to Australia’s. Both order platforms to remove underage account holders outright rather than gate specific content, the narrower approach Britain chose instead.

Australia’s Seven Months of Evidence

Macron has pointed to Australia as the model. Its early results cut both ways.

• More than 5 million accounts had been removed, deactivated or restricted since Australia’s ban took effect on December 10, 2025.
• Nearly 70 percent of parents surveyed by the eSafety Commissioner still said their teens held a Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok account months after the ban began.
• $69 million is the maximum fine regulators can now levy, after Canberra doubled the penalty in June following weak compliance.
• Five platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, remain under active investigation for suspected breaches.

Investigators found platforms letting children retry age checks until they scored old enough. Some teenagers reportedly beat facial-scan checks with nothing more than a drawn-on moustache.

Researchers had flagged this exact risk before Australia’s ban even began. Seven months of enforcement data now back a warning that bans would backfire once they met real enforcement, and the figures Canberra has published so far follow much the same script. Australia’s own regulator confirmed 4.7 million under-16 accounts removed by mid-December, a number that kept climbing without closing the gap parents describe.

Who Still Controls Enforcement, Paris or Brussels?

Paris wrote the law, but Brussels still holds real leverage. The European Commission backed France’s right to legislate the day the bill passed. But it noted that enforcement against the biggest platforms still runs through EU rules those companies must follow across all 27 member states, not just inside France.

France’s own Constitutional Council has not yet signed off, and some left-wing lawmakers already question whether the ban is enforceable at all. Arnaud Saint-Martin, a lawmaker from the left-wing France Unbowed party, said that while children face real dangers online, “they also find ways to access information and empower themselves, opening new horizons” that a ban could close off too.

The pressure for age limits is not confined to Europe or the Pacific either. In the Philippines, telecom operator Globe Telecom has backed rules restricting under-16 access to the same handful of apps now facing restrictions on three continents. Meta and YouTube face a parallel fight in the United States too, where both companies have appealed a jury verdict over social media addiction, a reminder that legal exposure over how platforms treat young users now stretches well past France’s borders.

The Constitutional Council still has to sign off before any of it takes effect on September 1.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is France the first country to ban social media for children?

No. Australia was first, barring under-16s from major platforms starting December 10, 2025, a policy Indonesia has also moved to copy for its own younger users. France is the first European Union country to pass a blanket account ban into law, rather than the narrower content-based checks other EU states have discussed.

How will France actually verify a user’s age?

The digital minister says several verification tools already exist, with more in development, and platforms carry the responsibility to apply them. Separately, the European Commission has built its own verification wallet, unveiled in April 2026, which lets a user scan an ID once and then approve age checks by tapping a phone notification, using cryptographic proofs that avoid sharing the ID itself with each app.

What happens if a platform just ignores France’s rules?

France’s regulator, ARCOM, already has a track record on a related rule for pornography sites, issuing formal notices that start a 48-hour clock to comply or be blocked. Some platforms facing that regime chose to block French users themselves rather than carry a public enforcement notice, a pattern regulators expect could repeat under the new law.

Does the ban cover apps like WhatsApp or Discord?

France has not published a specific exemption list. Australia’s version, which France is using as a rough template, exempts messaging and gaming-adjacent services such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Discord, Steam and YouTube Kids, so a similar carve-out for France would not be surprising, though it remains unconfirmed.

What exactly did the European court rule on in June?

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on a separate, older case about pornography site age checks, not France’s social media law directly. It decided a member state can require age verification from platforms based elsewhere in the EU when protecting children counts as a public policy objective, the same legal principle France’s new social media law now leans on for cover.