On Friday 14 August France’s Constitutional Council struck down the ban on social media access for those under 15 – the flagship provision of a law aimed at protecting minors from online harms. The Council is the country’s highest authority for ensuring that enacted laws comply with the Constitution.
Finally adopted by Parliament on 21 July, the provision was set to take effect on 1 September. It will not be able to do so in its current form. The Council’s members – or "Wise Men" as they are sometimes referred to in France – did not dispute the need to protect children from the dangers of social media, but found that lawmakers had opted for a response that was too broad and lacked sufficient safeguards.
Opponents of the law, who denounced it as a major assault on freedom of expression, are welcoming the development, but the battle is not yet won: other regulatory measures may resurface in the coming months in different forms. Nothing is certain yet, and the ultimate goal has not changed.
President Macron made it very clear that he wanted a new law to be drafted by next spring – this time, "legally sound". This has been a long-standing presidential commitment, and Macron has no intention of giving up on the issue.
The bill originated from a legislative proposal introduced in the National Assembly in November 2025 by Renaissance MP Laure Miller. Its aim was to address well-documented concerns about the effects of social media on minors: addiction, sleep disorders, anxiety, cyberbullying and exposure to pornographic or dangerous content.
The Council of State, consulted in January 2026, had itself acknowledged that these risks justified government intervention. At the same time, it had issued a prescient caveat: a general and absolute ban on all social media for those under 15 might fail to strike a sufficient balance between child protection and children’s fundamental freedoms.
Warnings Unheard
The warning was specific. The Council of State noted that the very broad definition of social media could encompass not only TikTok, Instagram or X, but also collaborative services, communication apps, information-sharing platforms and educational or community activities – even though the risks to minors in these contexts were not necessarily established. It therefore recommended a much more targeted approach: banning platforms that pose a specific danger and allowing access to others subject to parental consent.
However, the legislative process did not follow the recommendation. The Senate had adopted a phased approach, based in particular on a blacklist of platforms considered dangerous. This solution was ultimately abandoned during parliamentary discussions. The final version of the bill retained a much broader ban, without a specific list of platforms, and Parliament adopted it on 21 July. The matter was referred to the Constitutional Council two days later and again on 24 July, by a group of deputies from the radical left.
A Blanket Ban Deemed Too Broad
It was precisely this generality that the Constitutional Council took issue with. In its 14 August decision, it acknowledged that protecting the best interests of the child is a constitutional requirement and can fully justify limiting minors’ access to social media.
However, this protection must be balanced against freedom of expression and communication, which is itself guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. According to the Constitutional Council, the ban could apply to services for which the danger to minors had not been established. It therefore constituted a restriction that was “not appropriate, necessary, or proportionate” to the objective pursued.
The second weakness of the measure concerned privacy. To enforce an age-based ban, platforms would have had to implement mechanisms to determine whether their users were under or over 15 years of age. The problem therefore did not concern only children: in practice, adults themselves might have had to prove their age. However, the Constitutional Council found that the legislature had not sufficiently defined the procedures for this verification nor provided the necessary safeguards to protect privacy.
The scope of the decision therefore deserves to be clearly understood. The Constitutional Council did not rule that the state had no right to protect children from social media. Nor did it establish any kind of right of children to use TikTok. It ruled that, to achieve this legitimate objective, the legislature could not indiscriminately ban access to such a vast array of services while imposing an age-verification system that did not adequately protect personal data.
The decision is all the more embarrassing for lawmakers given that the system’s main flaws had been identified even before its adoption. The Council of State had warned of the excessively broad nature of the ban and recommended a graduated approach. The Senate had attempted to adopt this approach before the final compromise reverted to a blanket ban. The rejection on 14 August thus appears to be the result of a legal risk that had been clearly identified for months.
The Battle Is Not Over
Opponents of the bill are expressing relief. However, it would be premature to consider the bill dead and buried: the government can always try again, and the protection of minors will always provide a difficult-to-challenge pretext for restrictions on civil liberties – from which the entire population will suffer.
On the right, the Rassemblement National’s (RN) position in the debates leading up to the July vote was vigorously criticized on social media, with many prominent voices in conservative circles accusing Marine Le Pen’s party of failing to speak out forcefully enough against an initiative ultimately intended to exercise online control over all individuals. The RN did, in fact, abstain on the bill without proposing a convincing alternative and has already announced its intention to support the new bill.
The merit of the Constitutional Council’s decision lies in highlighting two imperatives that must be balanced: effectively protecting minors from platforms whose harmful effects are increasingly well-documented without imposing an indiscriminate ban that forces the entire population to undergo age verification procedures.
It is precisely this balance that Parliament has, for the time being, failed to achieve. Doing so will require further work and exploration of other avenues, for example controlling minors’ access to smartphones or targeting specific platforms. It is up to lawmakers to demonstrate creativity in safeguarding what matters most.