France Blocks Social Media for Under-15s

When French schools reopen in September, pupils under 15 may discover that Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat are no longer legally available to them. On 20 July, a joint committee of deputies and senators agreed on a ban that would stop under-15s from holding social media accounts (Le Progrès, Midi Libre). If both chambers approve the text, France becomes one of Europe's clearest tests of a question familiar to any parent in Malta as much as in Marseille: can the state actually keep teenagers off social media?

The French parliament chose a blunt line. Instead of banning only the most harmful platforms and allowing parental consent for others, as the Senate preferred, lawmakers settled on one age threshold: no social media before 15, with exceptions for educational services such as Wikipedia (Le Parisien, LCP). France is betting that one enforceable boundary will work better than asking regulators to judge platform by platform.

How do you check age without checking identity?

Passing the ban is the simple part. Enforcing it without turning every login into an identity checkpoint is much harder. France is not proposing that TikTok ask a 14-year-old for a passport. The model described by supporters relies on a third-party verifier: an independent service checks whether the user is above or below 15 and sends the platform only a yes-or-no answer (RTL).

The idea is close to a bouncer at a club door. The bouncer sees your ID, confirms you are old enough, and lets you in. The bar does not receive your name or date of birth. In cryptography, the same principle is called a zero-knowledge proof: proving one fact, such as being old enough, without handing over the underlying document. The EU's expert panel on child safety recommends this as the privacy-conscious route (Commission panel). The EU is also developing a Digital Identity Wallet that should allow citizens to prove attributes such as age without disclosing the rest of their identity (EU Digital Identity Wallet).

This is already moving from policy paper to practice. Ofcom's first UK review of age assurance found 69 million completed age checks across 32 services, using methods ranging from facial age estimation to photo-ID matching (Ofcom). But none has yet been tested at the scale demanded by social media, where millions of logins happen constantly and where young users have every incentive to try again.

The gap between a gate and a wall

An age gate on a pornography site has one obvious entrance. Social media does not. There are existing accounts, family tablets, older siblings' phones, VPNs, and 14-year-olds who understand the workaround culture of the internet better than most policymakers.

The Commission's expert panel warns that early experience with broad bans suggests many minors still find ways through (Commission panel). The familiar birthday dropdown is not treated by Ofcom as an effective check (Ofcom). Facial age estimation is stronger, but it becomes most difficult precisely around 14 and 15, where the French legal boundary is being drawn.

France writes the rule. Who enforces it?

France can write the law, but Meta, TikTok and Google run their EU operations from Ireland. Enforcement therefore runs through the EU's Digital Services Act, the bloc's platform regulation system, which gives the European Commission and Ireland's national regulator shared oversight of very large platforms (DSA). The Commission is already examining 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 framework, combining age thresholds with platform design duties (20minutos). Ireland's Michael McGrath has argued that the complexity calls for EU-wide rules rather than a patchwork of national systems (Irish Examiner).

For Malta, the point is not only French domestic politics. EU digital regulation lands quickly in a small market where teenagers, schools and parents use the same platforms as everyone else, and where enforcement capacity is limited by scale. If France can force the plumbing to work, other member states will be tempted to copy it. If it cannot, the lesson will be just as useful.

France is now asking platforms, age-verification providers and EU regulators to make the system function after the political decision has been taken. Supporters want it ready by September's rentrée, the return to school (RTL). But adopting a law and deploying privacy-preserving age checks across every major platform are not the same timeline. The next test is practical: whether platforms build checks that do not become ID collection by another name, whether teenagers route around them, and whether EU regulators treat enforcement as a priority or let it fade into another compliance file.