France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans

As European member states such as France, Austria, Greece, and Spain advance legislative proposals establishing social media bans for children and minors of varying ages, the recent decision of the French Constitutional Council, the country’s highest constitutional authority, is a clear signal and reminder of the primacy of ensuring policy centers on, and at the very least does not impede, the fundamental rights of children and all users.

On Aug. 14, France’s Constitutional Council, the country’s highest constitutional authority, struck down the central provision of a law that would have prohibited children under 15 from accessing social media. The law, adopted by the French Parliament on July 21, was intended to address risks the Parliament determined were associated with social media use, including anxiety, depression, sleep disorders and online harassment. It was due to take effect at the start of the 2026-27 school year.

Now, the Constitutional Council has declared Article 1 of the bill contrary to the French Constitution. The Council did not reject the objective of protecting children. Instead, it found that the blanket prohibition was disproportionate because it did not adequately account for differences among services or among individual children.

It also found that the legislation failed to provide sufficient legal safeguards for age assurance, which could require adults as well as children to prove their age before accessing covered services. President Emmanuel Macron has tasked Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to prepare a revised proposal, with the government aiming for a new version by spring 2027.

The bill, initially titled "Loi visant à protéger les mineurs face aux risques associés à l'usage des réseaux sociaux" (Law aiming to protect minors from risks associated with social media usage), was expected to be a sweeping victory for President Macron’s final year in office.

We discuss three key ideas from the French Constitutional Council’s decision that should be considered as the institutions develop their EU-wide approach on child online safety.

Broad scope of services covered violates freedom of expression

One reason the French Constitutional Council revoked Art. 1 of the bill is its failure to distinguish between the services concerned based on their nature, functionalities, risks, and needed safeguards.

The Council found that the ban, defined by cross-reference to the EU's Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act via Article 6 of the French law of 21 June 2004, "covers access to any online platform allowing end users to connect and communicate with one another, share content and discover other users and other content," and that access to such services "is not subject to any condition relating to the functionalities or content offered, the dangers to which they expose users, and the inadequacy of the safeguards with which they are provided.”

It further noted that the prohibition carried some exceptions. It did not apply to online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories, or platforms for the development and sharing of free software or open-source digital projects with an educational purpose. However, the Council found that these exemptions "remained limited.”

Although the Council agreed in principle that protecting children's best interests may justify restricting minors’ access to social media, it found the ban neither necessary nor proportionate to the objective pursued, and unduly infringing on children's and minors' freedom of expression and communication. As enshrined in Art.11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, freedom of expression is essential for children and minors, even if it is often overlooked.

Echoing warnings from CDT Europe, Tech Legality, and many civil society organizations, the Council noted that broad social media bans disproportionately deny young people’s rights to access to information and democratic participation.

Indeed, children are active citizens who need to participate in their nations’ democratic processes. Excluding minors below the voting age from accessing a wide variety of social media services and, hence, from participating in online debates around elections is a missed opportunity to prepare and equip future voting citizens with the knowledge of how they can meaningfully engage in debates on democratic values in the modern age, which largely happens on these services.

By treating the entirety of social networking service(s) as defined by French law (which uses the definition of Art.2(7) DMA) as a monolithic threat, the bill overblocked benign digital infrastructure, ignoring the reality that digital platforms are also essential tools for education, civic engagement, and community building.

As supported by several submitted amicus briefs accompanying the Constitutional Council’s decision, Art. 1 indiscriminately restricts access to educational, cultural, and civic content, as well as the exercise of freedom of expression by young people aged 13 to 15 and the interpersonal communication tools that are essential to modern social life.

Lack of safeguards for age assurance

The French Constitutional Council ruled that the lack of safeguards for the deployment of age verification falls short of constitutional privacy guarantees for all users, adults and children alike, in France.

The Council stated that ‘[by] prohibiting any minor under the age of fifteen from accessing certain online services, the contested provisions themselves imply that every person, even an adult, must prove his or her age before accessing them. In the absence of a determination of the conditions and limits within which this must thus be justified, the legislature has not provided the legal safeguards of such a nature as to ensure compliance with these constitutional requirements.’

Considering the scope and scale of privacy risks inherent to widespread age assurance, it is surprising that the legislature has not seen the need to add clear safeguards for age assurance.

Based on the French government’s submission to the Council on Aug. 5, 2026, it appears that this was not an omission, but rather intentional. The government argued that the Digital Services Act (DSA), in particular the Art 28 DSA Guidelines, conclusively regulates age assurance, and that the French legislature hence does not have the competence to set (additional) safeguards and parameters for the deployment of age assurance: ‘The definition of the prohibition – access to social media services for minors under 15 – and the definition of the arrangements for compliance therewith, its monitoring and, where applicable, its sanction, accordingly fall within two different bodies of rules – the first, domestic law, the second, European Union law.’

The Council did not engage with this argument and, as cited above, plainly stated that the missing safeguards in the national legislation fell short of constitutional requirements. The reason for this might be that the safeguards and parameters highlighted by the French government are not included in the DSA itself, but merely in the Art. 28 DSA Guidelines, which are non-binding. It is the Guidelines that recommend which age assurance method should be deployed for which safeguarding purpose, and how the appropriateness and proportionality of age assurance should be assessed in terms of its accuracy, reliability, robustness, non-intrusiveness and non-discrimination.

As these parameters are only included in the Guidelines, and not in the DSA as the underlying legislative act, it can be argued that the EU has not conclusively ‘regulated’ age assurance. In the context of a potential social media ban, the French government could have incorporated the decision whether to deploy age assurance as well as the safeguards for such deployment contained in the Guidelines into any national legislative act. Such an inclusion would not constitute an infringement of the EU’s competences, but rather a manifestation of non-binding EU guidance at national level.

When finding the law to be constitutionally deficient, the Council focused only on the lack of legal safeguards in the national law. However, this does not mean that including safeguards would automatically cure the unconstitutionality of widespread age assurance. Depending on the scope and method of deployment, the widespread deployment of age assurance might still carry significant risks to privacy, non-discrimination, freedom of expression and access to information.

As the Council did not provide any guidance on what legal safeguards are required to ensure the ban meets privacy constitutional guarantees, the legislature has to reconsider its approach and develop such legal safeguards for the next iteration of the law.

Lack of parental oversight compounds the freedom of expression violation

The Council held that the exclusion of parental oversight as a mechanism to override or limit the ban undermines the right to freedom of expression. In the eyes of the Council, this exclusion of parental participation in the child’s social media consumption leads to the complete disregard for assessing the individual risk to a minor, ‘taking into account in particular his or her age, degree of maturity and family situation, as well as the nature of the service concerned.’ Similar arguments were put forward by Bon Sens in their amicus brief, stating that a total ban institutes a general presumption of ‘educational incapacity’ against all families in France.

This was further supported by ONEST in their amicus brief, stating that ‘[i]t is for the parents, not the State, to assess, child by child and service by service, what the age and maturity of the one permit with regard to the other.’

The Council therefore appears to give a clear directive to the legislature to include an individual assessment mechanism, possibly through parental decision-making power, in the next iteration of the law, rendering an ‘absolute’ ban unconstitutional. The decision is ambiguous in this regard, criticizing on the one hand the lack of parental involvement in governing children’s access to social media, while on the other hand stating more broadly that the lack of any particular assessment of the risk to the minor poses a disproportionate infringement of the right to freedom of expression.

The Council underlined that legal guardians should be able to "decide to lift the ban, to limit its scope or to authorize access to certain services" in the interest of the child. If read as a call for a parental decision-making mechanism, this might, in theory, allow social media access for those under 15 in cases where they appear sufficiently mature and resilient to respond to potential risk encounters.

However, implementing a parental decision-making mechanism will depend on establishing some form of verifiable parental consent (VPC), including a mechanism to determine whether a user is a child and to accurately link the identity to the child's legal guardian, depending on the degree of certainty required. This poses a myriad of legal and factual implementation issues.

Drawing from experience with the protection of children’s personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation, service providers genuinely struggle to provide a VPC mechanism that verifies that the person giving consent on behalf of the child is indeed the child’s parent or legal guardian.

Further, VPC poses serious concerns with regards to reliability and equity. Approved techniques such as government ID checks, facial recognition matching, knowledge-based authentication, and credit card verification are each susceptible to circumvention by children, carry significant privacy risks for parents, and impose enough friction that many families do not complete them.

There is no solution for cases in which children’s parents have separated and both have different opinions about consenting to their child’s use of digital services. Common VPC methods exclude millions of caregivers who are unbanked, undocumented, or from non-traditional family arrangements. The burden falls disproportionately on the most vulnerable children, i.e., those in foster care, or with absent or disengaged parents, who are arguably those the policy is most intended to protect.

This shows that parental consent, instead of a blanket ban, appears to be less intrusive in theory, but poses serious questions in terms of effectiveness, reliability and equity.

Council ruling sets the tone as Brussels weighs an EU-wide social media ban

Amidst ongoing developments of legislative proposals by EU member States on the protection of children and minors online, the Constitutional Council’s decision has sent a shockwave expected to have some effect in Brussels ahead of the highly anticipated EU-wide position on child online safety due by December 2026. The decision exposes a critical regulatory flaw that has remained overlooked until now: penalizing children and minors with bans, while politically expedient, is shortsighted regarding the fundamental rights implications and will likely face significant legal and practical limitations.

Age assurance deployment is a core part of the EU’s approach to child online safety, even outside a general ban. Alongside ensuring all service providers comply with the Article 28 guidelines, providers should conduct a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA), including a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), before deploying any age assurance measure. It is essential to ensure that both the decision whether to deploy age assurance and the choice of the means of deployment remain strongly grounded in fundamental rights.

National bans mainly targeting users rather than platforms themselves miss key opportunities to address the root causes of many of the concerns related to minors’ activities on social media.

Some of these may be addressing and systematically identifying risks that may be posed by design features present on services and identifying pathways to mitigate such risks. Encouraging platforms to change their addictive design features under the DSA and Article 28 guidelines may achieve the desired objective of automatically protecting minors and children as well as protecting all users online without requiring invasive, state-mandated digital exclusion and overreach.

It is now clear that platforms are increasingly facing court cases seeking to hold them responsible for design features of their products worldwide, with the drumbeat of court cases in the US, including some initial rulings against platforms.

Notwithstanding whether they will go unchallenged or their effectiveness, efforts like the Art 28 Guidelines issued under the Digital Services Act may actually shift company incentives to identify and mitigate risks posed by these design features beyond just hitting companies where it will have the most impact on their economic incentive. However, shifting corporate incentives is just one side of the coin. Ensuring that existing and upcoming regulatory mechanisms strike the right balance and withstand judicial scrutiny is the other side.

What policymakers could take from the ruling

As the 2027 French presidential race begins to ramp up, the Constitutional Council’s decision sets a unique precedent by creating a high-stakes campaign subject that candidates across the political divide will likely exploit, potentially framing the rejection as either an overreach of judicial activism or as a sign of executive incompetence in drafting enforceable laws.

Consequently, President Macron’s push for a revision before the Spring of 2027 positions the Bill as a formidable test of boundaries between state-mandated digital protection and constitutional civil liberties. Gabriel Attal, a French political figure, has already demanded a national referendum, using the Constitutional Council’s block to frame mainstream politics as disconnected from everyday parental anxieties and restrained by elite judicial oversight.

Looking at Brussels, the Constitutional Council’s decision should force a much-need reflection moment on the necessity for the European Commission to grapple with the extent of alignment between its anticipated EU-wide framework and the protection of fundamental human rights of minors and children as well as of all users.

In the immediate term, the Constitutional Council’s signal is crystal clear: Protecting minors and children online cannot be achieved by infringing on their rights to freedom of expression, access to information, privacy, and data protection. With that in mind, EU policymakers must pivot from restrictive access control to insist on platform safety-by-design and by default.