France Bars Under-15s From Social Media

When French pupils go back to school in September, some of them may find the rules of online life have changed before the classroom doors even open. On 20 July, a joint committee of deputies and senators agreed a text that would ban children under 15 from holding social media accounts (Le Progrès, Midi Libre). If both chambers adopt it, France will become one of Europe’s sharpest test cases for a question that has moved from the kitchen table to parliament: can the state actually keep young teenagers off Instagram?

The French parliament has gone for a clear line. The Senate had preferred a narrower model, blacklisting the most harmful platforms while allowing parents to approve access to others. Deputies and senators instead settled on a single age threshold: no social media before 15, with carve-outs for educational services such as Wikipedia (Le Parisien, LCP). France is betting that one enforceable boundary will work better than trying to police each platform one by one.

How do you check age without checking identity?

Writing the ban is the straightforward part. Enforcing it without turning every login into an identity check is the harder business. France is not proposing that TikTok should ask a teenager for a passport. The model being described by supporters would use a third-party verifier: an independent service checks whether a user is above or below 15 and sends only a yes-or-no answer to the platform (RTL).

The easiest comparison is a bouncer at the door. The bouncer looks at your ID, confirms you are old enough, and lets you in. The bar never needs your name or date of birth. In cryptography, the same principle is known as a zero-knowledge proof: proving one fact, such as being old enough, without handing over the evidence behind it. The EU’s expert panel on child safety has recommended this as the privacy-friendly route (Commission panel). Brussels is also developing a Digital Identity Wallet, intended to let citizens prove attributes such as age without revealing everything else on an ID document (EU Digital Identity Wallet).

There is already some practice behind the theory. Ofcom’s first UK review of age assurance found 69 million completed age checks across 32 services, using methods from facial age estimation to photo-ID matching (Ofcom). What has not yet been tested is whether these systems can survive the scale, speed and messiness of social media.

The gap between a gate and a wall

A pornography site has a relatively clear entrance. Social media does not. There are old accounts, family tablets, older siblings’ phones, VPNs and 14-year-olds with every incentive to find the weak point.

The Commission’s expert panel warns that early experience with blanket bans suggests many minors still get through (Commission panel). The familiar birthday dropdown is not regarded by Ofcom as an effective check (Ofcom). Facial age estimation sits somewhere in the middle, but its accuracy becomes most fragile around 14 and 15, exactly where the law would draw the line.

France writes the rule. Who enforces it?

France can legislate, but the largest platforms are not run from Paris. Meta, TikTok and Google base their EU operations in Ireland, which means enforcement quickly becomes a European question with an Irish address. Under the Digital Services Act, the European Commission and Ireland’s national regulator share oversight of very large platforms (DSA).

That matters because the Commission is already looking closely at Meta and TikTok over design features that may keep younger users hooked, with possible fines of up to 6% of global turnover (Slaughter and May, DSA). Spain is developing its own approach, combining age thresholds with duties on platform design (20minutos). Ireland’s Michael McGrath has argued that the complexity points towards EU-wide rules rather than a patchwork of national systems (Irish Examiner).

France is trying to make the platforms, age-verification providers and EU regulators build the machinery after the political decision has been made. Supporters want the ban operating by the September rentrée (RTL). But passing a law and rolling out age checks across the social internet move on very different clocks. The test now is whether platforms build privacy-preserving checks, whether teenagers find the gaps, and whether EU regulators treat enforcement as a priority or allow it to drift.