French court strikes down under-15 social media ban as unconstitutional

France's prohibition on social media access for anyone under 15 has been struck down by the Constitutional Council, the country's highest authority on constitutional matters. The ruling, delivered on Friday, found the legislation incompatible with freedom of expression, parental authority and data privacy. It is the most significant legal defeat so far for President Emmanuel Macron's digital agenda and exposes a dilemma that extends well beyond France: national governments eager to protect children online are struggling to design laws that survive constitutional scrutiny while staying within the boundaries of European Union regulation.

A bill redesigned around Brussels, rejected in Paris

The legislation that the Constitutional Council threw out had already been through one radical restructuring. Early drafts included direct penalties for technology companies that permitted underage users on their platforms. Those provisions were removed during the parliamentary process because they would have collided with the EU's Digital Services Act, which reserves enforcement powers over large online platforms for the European Commission and national authorities acting under EU law.

Faced with that constraint, French legislators chose a different route: instead of holding platforms accountable, they imposed a blanket prohibition on minors under 15 using social media at all. The shift allowed the government to claim it was acting within its own competences rather than trespassing on Brussels' territory. But it created a law that punished the users it claimed to protect and left the companies that design addictive platforms untouched.

The Constitutional Council identified four separate constitutional defects. The ban infringed young people's right to express themselves and participate in public debate. It overrode parents' authority to decide how their children should engage with digital tools. It required age verification without providing adequate guarantees for the personal data that verification would generate. And it drew no line between genuinely dangerous social networks and harmless collaborative or educational applications, making the restriction disproportionate.

The senator who dissented from her own camp

Catherine Morin-Desailly, a centrist senator from Union Centriste who served as the bill's rapporteur in the Senate, had been raising the alarm for months. Her parliamentary group sits alongside Macron's governing coalition in the upper chamber, where the president's camp does not hold a majority of its own and depends on allies. Her objections therefore carried political as well as legal weight.

"Right up to the end, I warned of the constitutional risk," Morin-Desailly told Franceinfo on Saturday. She criticised the government for pressing ahead before the start of the school year in September, brushing aside the Senate's constitutional concerns. "We have wasted a lot of time," she said.

The senator's position was not simple opposition. She had recommended in July that the Senate pass the bill, but as a political signal to push the European Commission towards EU-wide action, not as workable law. The government chose to treat that vote as a mandate rather than a warning, accelerating the text towards a ruling that experienced lawyers had predicted for months.

Opposition parties demand platform accountability

The constitutional challenge was led by the Socialist Party and La France Insoumise, the left-wing movement headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Both parties described the ruling as a serious defeat for Macron's centrist coalition, Ensemble pour la République.

Their argument rests on a principle that the struck-down law inverted: the burden of regulation, they say, should fall on the companies that design and profit from addictive platforms, not on the children who use them and the parents who supervise them. The Socialist Party said on Facebook that it had consistently warned the measure was both unenforceable and misdirected.

Arthur Delaporte, a Socialist deputy, articulated the alternative approach. Rather than banning platforms outright, he argued, regulation should target the specific design features and content that cause harm, and platforms that refuse to reform should face consequences. His party advocates phased access from the age of 13, combined with targeted obligations on companies to remove dangerous content and redesign addictive features.

A European patchwork under strain

France is not the only member state attempting to tighten controls on children's access to social media. Spain has already adopted stricter regulations. In Germany, the governing coalition is debating a similar approach. Each national initiative reflects genuine public concern: a growing body of scientific evidence links the design of addictive social media platforms to deteriorating mental health and disrupted brain development in young people.

But the result is an inconsistent patchwork. Different constitutional traditions produce different rules, different age thresholds and different enforcement mechanisms, all operating beneath an EU framework that concentrates regulatory power over the largest platforms in Brussels. Legal experts consulted during the French legislative process warned that effective child protection on digital platforms must ultimately go through the European Commission, because national measures will keep running into the same twin barriers: the DSA's allocation of platform enforcement, and domestic constitutional protections for expression and parental rights.

The Commission is expected to propose a draft regulation on social media for young people this autumn. Its shape has not been made public, but it will need to navigate the same tensions that sank the French law: how to verify age without violating privacy, how to restrict harmful content without banning expression, and how to impose obligations on platforms that the DSA already regulates.

Macron pledges to try again

Macron responded to the ruling with a statement that acknowledged the decision without conceding the principle. "I take note of the Constitutional Council's decision on the ban on social media for under-15s, but I am not giving up," he said. He has instructed Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to prepare a revised bill that addresses the constitutional objections, with a target of spring 2027.

The timetable is tight and the drafting challenge considerable. A new bill will need to distinguish between harmful and benign platforms rather than imposing a blanket ban. It will have to preserve parental authority over children's digital access. It must incorporate privacy safeguards for age verification. And it cannot assign enforcement powers over platforms that the DSA reserves for EU-level authorities. Satisfying all four requirements simultaneously, within a single piece of legislation, may prove harder than the government has publicly acknowledged.