A vote in Paris this week drew a line that no European legislature had previously crossed.
French lawmakers approved a bill on Tuesday banning children under the age of 15 from using social media, making France the first country in the European Union to enact a blanket prohibition on minors’ access to such platforms. Both chambers of parliament voted in favour of the measure, which President Emmanuel Macron has championed as a flagship initiative of his second term. He wants the law in force by the start of the new school year in September, though a constitutional review is likely to delay that timetable.
The compromise text was agreed behind closed doors by a joint committee of MPs and senators on Monday, with only the hard-left France Unbowed party voting against and the Socialists abstaining. The bill also extends to mobile phone use in high schools, a provision that reflects a broader anxiety — shared across the political spectrum in France — about the effects of screens on adolescent development.
The dissent from the Socialists was pointed. Their MP Arthur Delaporte argued that a blunt, blanket ban was the wrong instrument, preferring instead the approach the European Commission has itself been advocating: targeted restrictions on the harmful features of social media rather than wholesale exclusion. It is a distinction worth taking seriously, not least because it raises the question of whether a prohibition that is difficult to enforce will simply be ignored, leaving the underlying problem unaddressed while generating compliance costs for platforms operating across the single market.
That tension sits at the heart of a wider European debate now gathering pace. Greece, Slovenia and Sweden are each planning their own restrictions on minors’ access to social media. Spain is considering a ban for children under 16; Austria is examining one for those under 14. The patchwork of national approaches is precisely what Brussels has sought to pre-empt. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called earlier this month for a phased and gradual access framework tied to age ranges, under which children below 13 would receive only time-limited access supervised by parents or teachers, with progressively greater access from 13 upwards conditional on platforms demonstrating that their products are age-appropriate and safe. She added that the Commission would present a formal proposal on the matter after the summer recess, and that it would include a separate ban on screens for toddlers.
The institutional logic of a harmonised EU-level framework is evident. Divergent national bans create regulatory fragmentation, complicate enforcement across borders, and risk pushing adolescents towards less regulated corners of the internet rather than genuinely reducing their exposure to harmful content. A well-designed common standard — one that places the burden of proof on platforms to demonstrate safety, rather than on governments to enumerate every harm — would be both more durable and more consistent with the principles of the Digital Services Act already on the statute book.
France’s move is nonetheless significant. Whatever its enforcement challenges, it signals that democratic governments are willing to act unilaterally when they judge the social cost of inaction to be too high, and it places pressure on Brussels to deliver something substantive rather than another round of consultation. For the parents, teachers and clinicians who have watched adolescent mental health deteriorate in the smartphone era, the question is no longer whether to act, but whether the action chosen will actually work — and whether it will arrive before another cohort of teenagers has grown up entirely online.