French Constitutional Council strikes down under-15 social media ban

France's Constitutional Council has struck down the centrepiece of President Emmanuel Macron's child protection agenda, ruling on Friday that a blanket ban on social media use for children under 15 violates fundamental rights. The decision delivers a significant setback to a legislative effort that had been rushed through parliament ahead of the September school year, despite warnings from the Senate's own rapporteur that the text carried severe constitutional risk.

A legislative strategy designed to bypass Brussels

The origins of the defeat lie in a calculated political gamble. French lawmakers, wary of clashing with the European Union's Digital Services Act, deliberately stripped the bill of any direct sanctions against technology platforms. The DSA, which entered into force in 2024, establishes a comprehensive framework for platform accountability across the single market; national laws that duplicate or contradict its enforcement mechanisms are vulnerable to challenge. Rather than hold companies responsible for verifying age or restricting access, the French text instead imposed a direct prohibition on minors themselves, a manoeuvre intended to sidestep EU competence while achieving the same practical outcome.

The Constitutional Council saw through the tactic. In its ruling, the court identified three distinct constitutional violations. First, the ban infringed the freedom of expression of young people, a right protected under both the French Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. Second, it stripped parents of their educational authority, substituting state coercion for parental judgment. Third, it lacked basic privacy safeguards for the mandatory age-verification checks that would have been required to enforce the prohibition, a particularly sensitive point given the Council's previous jurisprudence on biometric data and digital identity.

The court's reasoning: proportionality and distinction

Beyond those core objections, the judges took issue with the law's indiscriminate scope. The text made no distinction between social networks deemed hazardous, those employing algorithmic recommendation systems designed to maximise engagement, and collaborative educational or leisure applications that pose no comparable risk. A blanket ban covering both categories failed the proportionality test that French constitutional law demands: a restriction on fundamental rights must be necessary, adapted to its objective, and not excessive in its effects. By treating a classroom collaboration tool the same as a commercial platform optimised for addictive use, the legislation collapsed under its own lack of nuance.

The challenge was brought jointly by the centre-left Socialist Party and the left-wing populist movement La France Insoumise, an unusual alignment that underscores the breadth of opposition to the government's approach. In a Facebook post on Saturday, the Socialists declared: "We had warned them that this measure, as well as being unenforceable, missed the real issue." The verdict represents a rare parliamentary victory for opposition forces against Macron's centrist Ensemble pour la République coalition, which lacks an absolute majority in either chamber.

Opposition demands platform accountability, not child prohibition

The opposition's alternative vision crystallised in remarks by Socialist deputy Arthur Delaporte, who argued that regulation must target the design choices of platforms rather than the behaviour of children. "What is needed is not to say 'we're banning TikTok', but rather 'we're banning what is dangerous on the apps'; therefore, apps containing dangerous elements must be banned if they do not reform," he said. This position, phased access from age 13 combined with targeted obligations on platforms to remove or redesign harmful features, aligns more closely with the direction of travel in Brussels, where the European Commission has signalled that its forthcoming proposal will focus on platform-side duties rather than user-side bans.

Senate warnings ignored in rush to legislate

Perhaps the most damaging element for the government is that the constitutional danger was flagged internally, and in detail, before the bill passed. Catherine Morin-Desailly, a centrist senator from the Union Centriste group and the bill's rapporteur in the upper chamber, had voiced strong criticism throughout the process. "Right up to the end, I warned of the constitutional risk," she told Franceinfo on Saturday. Her parliamentary group is a key ally in the Senate, where Macron's camp does not command a majority of its own. Morin-Desailly criticised the government for acting too hastily, noting that forcing the regulation through before the September return to school "was not sensible." Looking back on the Senate's warnings that the executive chose to ignore, she concluded: "We have wasted a lot of time."

The senator's frustration is compounded by the fact that she had recommended in July that the bill pass as a symbolic spur for European regulation, a tactical vote intended to pressure Brussels, not a substantive endorsement of the French text. The government, however, treated the parliamentary process as a genuine legislative vehicle, accelerating the timetable in a way that left no room for the amendments the Senate had proposed to cure the constitutional defects.

Macron concedes the ruling but not the objective

For the president, the ruling is a personal as well as political blow. The social media ban had been presented as a flagship measure to address what Macron has repeatedly described as a public health emergency: the impact of addictive platform designs on children's mental health and brain development. Scientific evidence linking intensive social media use to anxiety, depression and attention disorders in adolescents has accumulated steadily in recent years, and the French executive had positioned itself at the forefront of the European response. On Friday, Macron struck a defiant tone. "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 stated. He instructed his prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, to present a legally sound revised version by spring 2027, a timeline that implicitly acknowledges the complexity of drafting a measure that can survive constitutional scrutiny while retaining political potency.

The European dimension: Brussels moves to end the patchwork

The French defeat accelerates a shift that was already underway in Brussels. European legal experts have long argued that effective child protection on digital platforms must go through the EU level, not least because the DSA's enforcement architecture, centred on the Commission's direct supervisory powers over very large online platforms, gives Brussels leverage that no national regulator can match. The European Commission has confirmed it will propose a draft regulation on social media for young people this autumn, explicitly aiming to end the patchwork of national initiatives that has emerged since the DSA entered into force. Spain has already adopted stricter regulations, including mandatory parental controls and age verification; Germany's governing coalition is discussing a similar approach. Without an EU framework, the single market risks fragmentation, with platforms facing 27 different compliance regimes for child safety.

The Commission's autumn proposal is expected to combine age-appropriate design obligations, restricting algorithmic amplification, infinite scroll and targeted advertising for minors, with strengthened age-assurance requirements that respect the GDPR and the EU's digital identity framework. Crucially, the obligation will sit with platforms, not with children or parents, avoiding the constitutional trap into which France has just fallen. The French revision, due by spring 2027, will therefore need to align with whatever EU text emerges from the legislative process in 2026-27, raising the question of whether a separate national law remains necessary or whether transposition of the EU regulation will suffice.

A regulatory vacuum with real consequences

In the interim, France has no dedicated legal framework for protecting children on social media beyond the general provisions of the DSA and the GDPR. The government's defeat leaves parents, schools and regulators without the specific tools the bill promised, default private accounts for minors, restricted night-time notifications, mandatory parental consent for under-15s. While the DSA requires very large platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks to minors, its enforcement is still in its early stages; the first compliance reports were only submitted in late 2025, and the Commission's investigative capacity remains stretched across dozens of simultaneous proceedings.

The practical effect of the ruling may therefore be to delay protection rather than improve it. Opposition parties argue that their alternative, platform-side duties phased in from age 13, would have been both legally durable and faster to implement, since it mirrors the DSA's existing architecture. The government's insistence on a distinctively French approach, complete with a symbolically potent age threshold of 15, has instead produced a vacuum that will persist for at least another year.

For Macron, the episode is a reminder that the European single market constrains national digital sovereignty in ways that domestic politics often ignores. The DSA was designed precisely to prevent a race to the bottom, or a race to the top, in platform regulation, ensuring that children in Paris, Madrid and Berlin enjoy the same baseline protections. France's attempt to leap ahead of Brussels has failed; the question now is whether the revised bill will complement the EU framework or attempt, once again, to pre-empt it.