France has become the first country in the European Union to pass a blanket ban on social media for children under 15, after both chambers of parliament approved the legislation on 21st July. The catch, buried in the final text, is that lawmakers removed the mechanism that was supposed to make it work.

The National Assembly passed the measure by 279 votes to 81, with President Emmanuel Macron hailing it as a major step forward. Yet the version that emerged from the joint parliamentary committee had been stripped of the clauses requiring platforms to build age-verification systems, and of the power that would have let France’s regulator compel them to comply. What remains, in the words of one legal analyst, is a general prohibition without a specified procedure to apply it.

What the law actually says

The ban takes the form of a new provision, Article 6-9, inserted into France’s 2004 law on confidence in the digital economy. It states simply that access to online social network services is prohibited for minors under 15. Three categories are exempt: online encyclopedias, educational and scientific directories, and open-source software development platforms with an educational purpose.

It applies in two stages. From 1st September 2026, under-15s will be barred from creating new accounts on the major platforms, understood to include TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. From 1st January 2027, existing accounts belonging to under-15s must be closed.

The law does not, however, say how a platform is meant to establish that a user is 15 or older, nor does it name the specific services caught by the ban, leaving that to be worked out from the existing legal definition.

How the enforcement mechanism was lost

The original bill, tabled by MP Laure Miller in November 2025, was far more prescriptive. It would have required platforms to use age-verification methods aligned with technical guidelines set by Arcom, the French audiovisual and digital regulator, and provided for fines of up to 3 per cent of a platform’s global turnover for non-compliance. A later version added a regulator-drawn ‘blacklist’ of platforms deemed harmful to minors.

Brussels intervened. In a detailed opinion issued on 6th July, the European Commission objected to the bill’s enforcement architecture, warning that it would create a parallel national supervision regime overlapping with the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc’s harmonised framework for regulating online platforms. France’s own Conseil d’État had raised a similar concern in January, cautioning that member states may not impose obligations on platforms that go beyond what the DSA allows.

Faced with that objection, French legislators reversed course, dropping both the blacklist and the provisions handing Arcom enforcement powers. The result is a prohibition that now depends largely on the DSA for its teeth, a point of some awkwardness given the DSA is precisely the instrument the original enforcement plan was found to conflict with.

A jurisdictional knot

The deeper difficulty is that most of the platforms operating in France are established elsewhere in the EU, chiefly Ireland. Under the country-of-origin principle that governs the single market, France cannot straightforwardly impose national rules on a company regulated in another member state without following a set procedure. The Commission’s objection was rooted in exactly this: framed as a rule for minors, the ban would in practice require platforms to verify the age of all users and, potentially, authenticate parental consent, which risks colliding with both the DSA and EU data protection law.

Digital affairs minister Anne Le Hénanff has defended the timetable, arguing that the technical tools for age verification already exist and are effective. Child protection advocates are less certain. Ines Legendre, a legal adviser at the online safety group e-Enfance, pointed to the practical questions left unanswered. “We’ll also have to address the issue of existing accounts for those under 15. How do we identify them? How do we suspend them? And then there’s the question of age verification for all new accounts,” she said.

Following Australia, watched by Europe

France is not acting in isolation. Australia’s world-first ban on social media for under-16s took effect in December across nine named platforms, carrying penalties running into tens of millions of dollars. Macron has repeatedly cited that model, and has pushed for the EU to adopt a bloc-wide minimum age, an idea the European Parliament endorsed in principle late last year.

For now, the French law still faces constitutional review before it is fully enacted, and the mechanics of enforcement remain to be assembled from instruments the statute itself does not spell out. Whether a ban without a defined verification system changes what French teenagers actually do online, or simply sets a marker for the rest of Europe to follow, is the question the coming months will answer.

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