France becomes first European country to ban social media for minors under 15

The French Parliament on July 21 definitively passed a law banning children under the age of 15 from accessing social media, making France the first country in Europe to enshrine such a restriction in its national legislation.

The measure is the culmination of a campaign led by President Emmanuel Macron since 2017 in which he has denounced anonymity on social media as a gateway to online abuse.

The law, presented as a child protection measure against all the risks associated with the use of social media, from addiction to bullying and abuse, has also reignited concerns about increased government oversight of internet users, as the age verification requirements — intended to target minors — entail identity checks for everyone.

“France is leading the way in Europe by becoming the first country to establish a ‘digital age of majority’ to better protect our children online,” said Anne Le Hénanff, minister delegate for digital sovereignty, following the vote.

The Senate adopted the compromise bill by a vote of 243 to 2, and the National Assembly followed suit a few hours later, paving the way for Macron to sign the measure into law, subject to review by the Constitutional Council.

The bill’s central provision bars minors under 15 from accessing “an online social network service.” Leading platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are expected to fall under the ban, though lawmakers left the precise scope undefined.

Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias, along with open-source software and educational platforms, are explicitly exempted. Responsibility for verifying users’ ages falls to the platforms themselves, which must offer at least two different verification methods.

Enforcement will unfold in two different stages. New accounts will be subject to age checks starting Sept. 1, while existing accounts belonging to minors under 15 will have until Jan. 1, 2027, before they are suspended.

The law also extends France’s existing smartphone ban in middle schools to high schools starting in the 2026 school year.

France’s move makes it the first EU member state to enact a blanket social-network age floor, though it follows Australia, which imposed a minimum age of 16 in December 2025.

Officials say a coalition of roughly 15 European countries is interested in adopting a similar standard. Le Hénanff confirmed Greece is ready to transpose the French model, with Spain expected to follow in the fall.

The European Commission is separately developing its own EU-wide age-verification tool, expected to be available to member states by the end of the year.

Under the model France has adopted — built around the “double anonymity” principle found in the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc’s main online-platform law — a trusted third party would verify a user’s age from an ID document or bank card and issue an anonymous token confirming only whether the user is over or under 15, without revealing the user’s identity or which platform requested the check. Le Hénanff has described this as a way of avoiding data collection by the platforms themselves. Critics, however, argue the system’s implementation is far less safe than officials suggest.

The underlying concern is that this child-protection measure could evolve into a broader mechanism for verifying and tracking the identity of internet users generally. Opponents of the law claim that the mechanics of age verification remain largely undefined barely a month before the law takes effect.

They also point to recent history of large-scale personal data breaches across government agencies as a reason for caution about centralizing age- or identity-verification data.

La Quadrature du Net, France’s leading digital-rights advocacy group, and the Conseil national du numérique, an official government advisory body, both warned that the law amounted to what they termed “generalized surveillance disguised as child protection.”

The European Center for Law and Justice, along the same lines, argues that France and the European Commission are each independently pushing to generalize identity checks across the EU under the banner of online safety policy.

Several digital-rights groups are reportedly preparing separate challenges before France’s Council of State and the EU’s Court of Justice, arguing the law violates free-expression and proportionality principles.

For now, all eyes are on Australia, the only country with a comparable ban already in force.

An early analysis of survey data from roughly 400 young social media users, published in The BMJ on June 24, found little evidence that Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act had produced any substantial early drop in social media use among adolescents in its first three months — although researchers cautioned that legislative effects can take time to appear and called for longer-term evaluation.

A companion analysis reported that roughly 85% of Australians aged 12 to 15 were still using restricted platforms, the most common workarounds being fake accounts and private browsers.

Source: https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/europe/france-becomes-first-european-country-to-ban