France moves to ban social media for under-15s before school year

A French reconciliation committee approved a compromise Monday that would ban social media use for children under 15 and could let the measure take effect at the start of the new school year in September. The same package also bars mobile phones in high schools, putting France on a faster track toward one of Europe’s toughest child-access rules online.

The National Assembly had already backed the bill 116-23, and lawmakers moved ahead after President Emmanuel Macron asked that the legislation be fast-tracked. PBS News and the Associated Press said the bill was later adopted by a 130-21 vote late Monday, underscoring the broad political momentum behind a proposal that Paris has cast as a child-protection measure rather than a symbolic warning to Silicon Valley.

The harder question is enforcement. The law would require age verification, which means platforms would have to build systems to check users’ ages before granting access. That raises an immediate privacy tradeoff: the more reliable the check, the more personal information users may have to hand over. It also shifts the burden away from a simple parental warning and onto companies, schools and families that would have to navigate how the rules work in daily life.

France would not be moving alone. Reuters said the country would become the second to impose such a ban after Australia, which barred social media for children below 16. Norway has moved to raise its minimum age limit on social media to 15, and the European Parliament’s research service said UNICEF counted nearly 40 countries that were discussing, proposing, adopting or implementing age-based restrictions as of mid-2026. France’s push fits squarely into that broader European effort to limit children’s exposure to algorithm-driven feeds, cyberbullying and harmful content.

In the United States, the debate has already moved well beyond theory. Pew Research Center found a majority of American adults support banning social media for children under 16, while at least 20 states have enacted laws touching minors’ access, age assurance or related online-safety rules. That patchwork has left litigation and implementation split across states, a reminder that the central problem is not just whether to set an age floor, but how to enforce it without turning age verification into a nationwide privacy test.