France’s top constitutional body strikes down social media ban for under-15s

A French law that would have barred children under 15 from social media was struck down by the country’s Constitutional Council on 14 August 2026, a little over two weeks before it was due to take effect.

The council, which reviews laws for compliance with the constitution before they come into force, declared the central article of the law unconstitutional. In its decision, numbered 2026-911 DC, it found that the ban infringed freedom of expression and communication in a way that was “not appropriate, necessary and proportionate” to its aim, and that it failed to protect the right to privacy.

What the law said

Parliament gave the law final approval on 21 July; the National Assembly, the lower house, passed it by 279 votes to 81. Article 1 prohibited, in principle, access by under-15s to online social networking services. New accounts were to be blocked from 1 September and existing ones closed four months later. There were no penalties for children or parents; platforms were to verify users’ ages. President Emmanuel Macron called the vote a “major step forward”.

Members of parliament from two opposition groups, the left-wing France Unbowed and the Socialists, referred the law to the council on 23 and 24 July. They challenged only Article 1. A separate provision banning mobile phones in upper secondary schools was not reviewed.

Why it fell

The council accepted the purpose of the law. Protecting the youngest users from addiction, isolation and exposure to pornography, harassment or fraud serves the constitutional requirement to protect the best interests of the child, it said, and such aims can justify limiting minors’ access to online services.

The problem was the breadth of the measure. The ban applied to any platform that lets users connect, communicate, share content and discover other users, without regard to its features, its content, the dangers it posed or the protections it offered. The exceptions, for online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories and open-source software platforms, were narrow. The council noted that leisure, information and mutual-help services, messaging applications, online games with strong social features and networks set up around educational activities were all caught. The ban could therefore apply to services “whose risks to the health and safety of minors” were “not established”.

The law also made no allowance for individual circumstances. Nothing in it let parents, once informed of the risks, lift the ban, limit it or allow access to particular services, and it took no account of a child’s age, maturity or family situation.

The second ground concerned everyone else. By closing certain services to under-15s, the council said, the law meant that “every person, even an adult,” would have to prove their age before using them. Parliament had not set out the conditions and limits of that proof, and so had not provided the legal guarantees that the right to privacy requires.

Reaction

Macron said the same day that he had asked Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to work on a “legally robust” version of the ban “as quickly as possible”, the parliamentary channel LCP reported. Servane Mouton, a neurologist and former co-chair of France’s commission on children and screens, regretted that a measure aimed at platforms with a toxic design had been buried.

The ruling does not close the door to age limits. Its reasoning points to what a new text would have to contain: a narrower definition of the services covered, tied to established risks; some role for parents; and rules written into the law on how age is to be proved. When parliament adopted the ban in July it was described as a first in Europe, and the Belga news agency reported that other European countries were considering similar laws.