France sets under-15 social ban

Every generation draws a line somewhere around childhood. For years, that line was about staying out late, cycling beyond the estate, or watching films you were too young to see. Now it runs through the phone in a teenager’s hand.

On 21 July, France’s Parliament voted to prohibit social-network access for anyone under 15, making it the first European country to put such a ban into law. Emmanuel Macron described it as opening a European path. Critics in the Assemblée called it a "grand flou" (France 24 / AFP). Both readings stand up. The law names the thing being banned, but leaves the machinery of enforcement largely undefined.

A rule with no bouncer

The text sets the age at 15, exempts educational platforms and open-source tools, and gives the industry a timetable. New accounts will be covered from 1 September 2026, while existing accounts will have until January 2027 (Libération). What it does not do is set out a precise method for checking age, create sanctions for parents or minors, or establish a national enforcement system (Sénat text). The platforms are, in effect, being told to solve the problem.

One idea, put forward by Renaissance deputy Laure Miller, is to use a third-party service that tells a platform only whether a user is "over or under 15", without handing over full identity data (RTL). It is a neat answer on paper. In practice, age verification keeps running into the same three pressures: certainty, privacy and convenience. A birthday field is easy to fake. A passport upload turns a social-media sign-up into an identity transaction. Facial-age estimation, where software guesses age from a selfie, becomes weakest around the teenage thresholds where accuracy matters most (UK Parliament POST). The UK’s Ofcom reached much the same conclusion this year: no single method works reliably on its own.

Earlier versions of the French law would have given Arcom, the French press and audiovisual regulator, broad powers to police platform compliance. The European Commission objected, because those powers cut across the Digital Services Act, the EU rulebook that governs how major online platforms operate. The final law was pared back. Legal scholars at Le Club des juristes argued it had been "largely emptied of its substance".

Governments agree on the age. Not on the plumbing

France has moved first, but it is not moving alone. On 21 July, the Commission’s child-safety expert panel recommended a harmonised EU-wide access restriction for children under 13, while leaving member states free to set stricter rules for older teenagers. The panel also wants to reverse the burden of proof. Instead of regulators having to show that a platform harms children, platforms would have to show that the space is safe before children are admitted.

To make that possible without turning every login into an ID check, the Commission has developed a privacy-preserving "mini wallet". In plain terms, it is a digital age pass: it answers a yes-or-no age question without revealing the user’s full identity. It is designed to sit alongside the EU Digital Identity Wallets that member states are due to roll out by late 2026. Ursula von der Leyen put the political argument sharply: the issue is not whether children can use social media, but "whether social media can access our children" (Euronews).

Across Europe, governments are reaching for age limits more quickly than they are building the systems to enforce them. Germany’s family minister Karin Prien backs 13 as a plausible common threshold (Tagesschau). Italy has several bills, but no enacted law (Fanpage). Ireland, where many of the largest platforms have their European headquarters, is looking at a tougher under-16 line (Irish Times). That gives Dublin an awkward double role: it is both a national government worried about children’s online lives and a key EU regulator for the companies in question. The appetite for action is clear. The enforcement model is still being assembled.

From the door to the room

Australia shows what can happen when the law gets ahead of behaviour. Three months after its under-16 ban took effect, a study found that 85% of surveyed minors still used covered platforms, often through fake accounts and private browsing (Chronicle). That does not mean bans have no value. They can reduce overall screen time, give parents a legal standard to point to, and force platforms to rethink how they bring young users in. But they do puncture the idea that childhood can be fenced off cleanly online.

The harder fight is moving from the door to the room itself. The Digital Services Act already gives Brussels powers to investigate whether very large platforms are doing enough to protect minors, and preliminary findings suggest Meta’s Facebook and Instagram failed to stop under-13s creating accounts. Italian consumer group Moige is suing Meta and TikTok not only over age checks, but over design features such as infinite scroll (Orizzonte Insegnanti). Age checks decide who gets in. Design decides what happens once they are there.

September will test whether the platforms treat France’s law as another compliance file or as a constraint on how their products are built. The adults who grew up posting selfies are now parenting children raised inside algorithmic feeds. Passing the law was the straightforward part. Making the lock work, without turning every child’s phone into an identity checkpoint, is the problem Europe has yet to solve.