Constitutional judges say child protection cannot justify indiscriminate restrictions and loosely defined age checks
France’s Constitutional Council has invalidated a law that would have barred children under 15 from social media, ruling that its blanket restrictions placed a disproportionate burden on freedom of expression and privacy. The decision does not prevent France from pursuing stronger online protections for children, but it requires lawmakers to distinguish between platforms, respect family circumstances and establish firm safeguards for any age-verification system.
The ruling, delivered on 14 August, interrupts President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to introduce the ban before the new school year. Parliament adopted the legislation on 21 July, after which more than 60 opposition deputies referred it to the Constitutional Council.
In its decision on the legislation, the Council accepted that protecting children’s health, safety and development is a legitimate constitutional objective. It nevertheless concluded that lawmakers had not reconciled that objective adequately with freedom of communication and the right to private life.
A ban drawn too broadly
A central problem was the law’s indiscriminate reach. The prohibition would have applied to all covered social-media services, without requiring evidence that each platform presented comparable risks to children.
That approach treated services with different designs, audiences and safety records as though they created the same dangers. It also failed to distinguish between children according to age, maturity or family situation.
The Council found that parents would have had too little room to guide their children or authorise access to particular services. A child approaching 15 would have faced the same automatic exclusion as a much younger user, regardless of the platform or the circumstances in which it was used.
The decision reflects a wider difficulty in European digital policy. Social media can expose young users to harassment, grooming, harmful content, commercial pressure and design features intended to prolong engagement. It can also provide access to education, friendship, cultural participation and public debate. Protecting children therefore requires more than choosing between unrestricted access and complete exclusion.
As The European Times previously reported, the European debate increasingly concerns the responsibilities of platform operators themselves. Regulators are examining recommender systems, addictive design, default privacy settings and content moderation, rather than placing the entire burden on children and parents.
Privacy problem reaches every user
The French law also required platforms to determine whether users were old enough to access their services. In practice, such a system could have obliged adults as well as children to prove their age.
The Constitutional Council found that the legislation did not define sufficiently the conditions, limits and safeguards governing that process. The concern was not merely technical. Age checks can involve identity documents, biometric estimation or information supplied by third parties. Poorly designed systems may collect more personal data than necessary, create new security risks or enable users’ activity to be linked across services.
A durable system must establish what information is collected, who can see it, how long it is retained and whether it can be used for another purpose. It must also provide alternatives for people who lack standard identity documents or whose appearance makes automated age estimation unreliable.
Those questions carry particular significance for marginalised children, including young migrants, children in care and those seeking confidential information about health, sexuality or abuse. A safety mechanism that blocks legitimate support or demands intrusive disclosure may create a different form of harm.
A narrower route remains open
The ruling does not amount to a constitutional endorsement of current platform practices. Nor does it prevent France from returning with a more carefully framed proposal.
A revised law could focus on services and design features for which specific risks have been established. It could give parents a proportionate role, recognise children’s evolving capacity and require platforms to reduce exposure to harmful recommender systems, unwanted contact and manipulative engagement features.
France will also have to align its approach with the Digital Services Act and the emerging European framework for age assurance. The European Commission has recommended anonymous proof-of-age technology designed to confirm that a user meets an age threshold without disclosing identity or date of birth to every platform.
Even privacy-preserving technology cannot answer the policy question by itself. Authorities must still decide when verification is necessary, which services justify it and what remedies are available when a person is wrongly excluded. Independent scrutiny will also be needed to assess accuracy, discrimination and data security.
Macron has asked the government to prepare a legally stronger proposal that accounts for the constitutional ruling and European law. The political pressure to act is unlikely to disappear, particularly as families, educators and health professionals raise concerns about children’s online experiences.
The Council’s message is nevertheless clear: urgency does not remove the need for precision. France can regulate platforms more firmly and protect children more effectively, but it must do so without turning every internet user into an identifiable subject or treating every young person’s circumstances as identical.
The next proposal will be judged not only by whether it keeps children away from harmful material, but also by whether it makes the companies designing digital environments bear a fair share of responsibility.
