Twenty-one days. That’s how long France’s landmark ban survived before its own Constitutional Council tore it up. Not proportionate. Not appropriate. And no real answer for how you’d verify a 14-year-old’s age without creating a privacy problem worse than the one you’re solving.
France’s Constitutional Council struck down the country’s under-15 (U15) social media ban Friday, just three weeks after Parliament approved it overwhelmingly and made France the first EU country to attempt a blanket age restriction. As TF reported in France Passes a Social Media Ban for Under-15s, the law would have required age verification for new accounts starting in September, with existing users facing checks by 2027. The Council ruled the restriction “disproportionately infringe[s] upon the freedom of expression and communication” and failed to provide “the legal safeguards necessary to ensure the right to respect for private life.” President Emmanuel Macron, who championed the bill, has already ordered a rewrite.
What’s Happening & Why It Matters
Too Broad and Too Strict
Here’s wha sank the law. The Council didn’t object to restricting minors’ social media access in principle. It objected to how the ban was written — too sweeping, treating every U15-year-old and every platform identically, with no room for individual circumstances or platform-specific risk. The ruling found the bill couldn’t prohibit minors from social media “without infringing upon freedom of expression and communication,” and was too broad to account for “the individual situation of each minor or the specific risks of each platform.”
That’s a narrower objection than “children shouldn’t be restricted at all.” It’s closer to “you can’t restrict everyone the same way, everywhere, without building in the nuance the constitution requires.” A blanket ban treating TikTok and a niche hobbyist forum identically, with no differentiation for actual risk level, is precisely the kind of overreach constitutional courts tend to flag.
The Age Verification Problem
The second objection is the one with real staying power across the policy area. The Council raised concerns about the privacy safeguards surrounding mandatory age verification — the exact mechanism every country attempting a social media age ban has to build. Verify that a user is U15 enough to enforce a ban, and you’ve built a system that identifies and tracks the age of every user on the platform, not just the ones you’re trying to restrict.
That’s the tension France’s law never resolved, and it’s the same one TF flagged when covering the UK’s parallel effort — as covered in UK Social Media Ban: How It Works, Who Backs It, and Who Doesn’t, critics there raised identical concerns about turning age verification into mass surveillance infrastructure. France’s own Constitutional Council just gave that criticism binding legal weight.
Macron Isn’t Giving Up
The setback is real, but it isn’t fatal to the project. Macron has asked Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to prepare a revised proposal, with the government still targeting new restrictions before spring 2027. That’s a specific and aggressive timeline for rewriting legislation that just got struck down for being too vague and too privacy-invasive in its current form — problems that don’t have obvious quick fixes.
Macron’s personal investment in the fight runs deep. He’s pointed to social media as a contributing factor in youth violence, and pursued the policy harder after a fatal school stabbing in eastern France. France had tried a narrower version back in 2023, requiring parental consent for U15 accounts — that law was blocked by EU regulatory constraints before it could take effect. This is Macron’s second attempt at some version of the restriction getting derailed by a legal or regulatory body, not public opposition.
France Was the First
The timing stings given how France claimed the EU-first title. French lawmakers approved the original bill just last month, positioning France ahead of every other EU member state and following Australia’s own world-first U16 ban from December, as TF covered throughout 2026. That first-mover status is gone, at least until Macron’s government produces a version that survives constitutional review.
Other EU countries watching France’s approach — including several TF has tracked considering comparable restrictions — have a concrete example of what not to write into law. A blanket, platform-agnostic ban with underdeveloped privacy safeguards around verification isn’t going to clear a serious constitutional challenge, in France or anywhere supporting similar free-expression protections.
TF Summary: What’s Next
Prime Minister Lecornu is preparing a revised proposal, with the government targeting implementation before spring 2027. No specific timeline exists yet for when the rewritten bill will return to Parliament. The original law’s September 2026 implementation date is void. France’s earlier 2018 phone ban in primary and middle schools is unaffected and continues in force.
MY FORECAST: Expect the rewritten version to differentiate by platform and risk level rather than applying a single blanket restriction, given how the Council flagged that failure. The harder problem — building age verification that doesn’t create a privacy risk of its own — won’t get solved quickly, and Macron’s spring 2027 target is optimistic against that reality. Watch whether France waits for the EU’s own minimum-age framework, which the European Parliament has pushed for, rather than solving the verification problem alone. A coordinated EU-wide standard would give France a technical and legal template the ruling suggests it lacks.
Related Stories
- France Passes a Social Media Ban for Under-15s
- UK Social Media Ban: How It Works, Who Backs It, and Who Doesn’t
- Starmer Confirms Full UK Under-16 Social Media Ban — Here’s the Timeline