France's Top Court Strikes Down Under-15 Social Media Ban

France's Constitutional Council struck down a law on 14 August 2026 that would have banned social media access for children under 15, ruling that the law violated freedom of expression and communication. The court's decision, numbered 2026-911 DC, invalidates the core of a bill called 'Protéger les mineurs - Risques des réseaux sociaux' that Parliament had passed on 21 July 2026. Article 1 of that law had blocked all minors under 15 from accessing online social networks, with no exceptions, and was set to take effect in September. Conseil constitutionnel

The court found that the law failed to spell out the 'conditions and limits' under which users would have to prove their age, and failed to include legal protections for the right to privacy. The blocked legislation would have required tech platforms to close existing accounts belonging to under-15s within four months and to use age-verification tools approved by France's privacy regulator, the CNIL. The Constitutional Council's ruling hinged on proportionality, a principle meaning that government restrictions on rights must be no broader than necessary to achieve their goal. The court concluded that a blanket ban on all under-15s, paired with vaguely defined age-verification requirements, could not be reconciled with constitutional protections. The Guardian

President Emmanuel Macron has asked Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to rewrite the legislation to address the Council's concerns. The Élysée, France's presidential office, has indicated that Macron still wants a social media reform law in place before the spring 2027 presidential election, for which he is ineligible to run for a third term. That timeline gives the government a narrow window to draft revised provisions that survive constitutional scrutiny on the specific grounds the Council identified: the absence of defined conditions for age verification and the lack of safeguards for private life. The Guardian

The broader context here is an accelerating international movement toward legally requiring age limits on social media platforms, with France's setback arriving as other countries move forward. Australia barred under-16s from leading social media platforms in December 2025, covering Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube. The French model targeted a lower age threshold of 15 and was structured around obligations placed on platforms to enforce the rule, rather than an outright ban on specific named services. The Constitutional Council's ruling draws a sharp line between what a law intends to do and how it actually operates: the law's protective purpose was not in question, but its mechanism was. The Guardian

For the regulatory landscape, the decision zeroes in on the technical design of age verification as the central issue. Any revised French legislation will need to specify exactly when and how age proof is collected, processed, and stored, and it will need to build in procedural safeguards that the original text lacked. The Council's reasoning suggests that a narrower approach, one that defines specific age-verification methods with clear limits on data collection, could pass constitutional review. The challenge for Macron and Lecornu is that the constitutional problems identified are structural rather than minor, and fixing them within the compressed pre-election timeline will require either a substantially redrafted bill or an entirely new legislative vehicle. Conseil constitutionnel

For tech platforms operating in France, the ruling preserves the status quo on underage access while signalling that legislative pressure is not going away. The platforms now have a reprieve from the four-month account-closure mandate, but the political consensus behind restricting minors' social media access remains intact across the French political spectrum. The question is whether the government can turn that consensus into a statute that survives the proportionality and specificity tests the Constitutional Council has now established.